


Another Green World

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Hogwarts, London, M/M, Music, Post-Hogwarts, Punk, The Prank, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-16 19:34:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8114827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: "Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years..." Several short drabbles I wrote on Tumblr, pieces of the same overarching story, archived here.





	1. things you said through your teeth

In the early Spring of 1976 James realized that a better way to go after Lily was to find out what kinds of things she enjoyed and speak to her about them, rather than harassing her with innuendo and vague allusions. As such he began casually bribing her friends, chiefly Mary and Dorcas, for said information about what kinds of things Lily liked, and as such he found himself up until three in the morning most nights doing Mary and Dorcas’s Astronomy homework. They had each told him their birthdates and told him to just go from there. After one successful run had scored them both Es on their homework, Mary had told James that Lily’s favorite recent record was Springsteen’s _Born to Run_ (in fact Lily hated this record, and had just discovered Can’s _Ege Bamyasi_ ) and Dorcas had told him that Lily loved all the Beats, which in fact she did not, except for Brautigan. Though, luckily enough for James, Remus had a book of Brautigan poems, which James set himself to memorizing, which had him up even after finishing Mary and Dorcas’s homework. 

As such one evening just before midnight when Sirius, as had become customary, waited until Remus and Peter were asleep and then crept surreptitiously toward James’s bed where the lights he'd conjured spread in a golden puddle upon the ceiling. When he parted the curtains James glimpsed him and shook his head curtly. 

“Why not?” 

“I told you,” James whispered. “We can’t do this anymore. I’m busy.” 

“I don’t know why,” said Sirius, pouting. “They’ve told you obvious bullshit. Does anyone in this world love both Ginsberg and Springsteen?” 

“Why would her two best friends lie?” 

“Because you’re an idiot.” Sirius sighed. “Come on. Let me in. It’ll take the edge off and it takes five minutes.” 

James was offended by this seeming slight to his virility. “I mean it,” he said. “We can’t do it anymore.” 

Sirius was trying very hard to look annoyed but affable and not deeply hurt, which he was. 

“That’s that,” said James, “it’s final.” 

“It’s not like you’re _married_ or — ” But he cut off there, because James had fixed him with a look. 

Indeed not a month thereafter Lily relented and accepted James’s invitation to Madame Puddifoot’s which for a Hogwarts fifth year was just about as good as a marriage proposal. James was delighted but also intimidated by the fact that Lily’s taste in music was actually a great deal better than he had been told by Mary and Dorcas and as such before their date he dragged Sirius and Remus and Peter to the Hogsmeade record shop to look for a gift of sufficient quality and niche value. Sirius was still feeling and acting put out over James’s throwing him over, which had James feeling put out, because it wasn’t as if touching someone’s genitals a few times was a kind of permanently binding transaction. Or at least, he hoped it wasn’t. Peter was confused about it but Remus who always seemed to know more than he let on was quiet and bemused and watchful. From a bargain bin of cassettes he unearthed a copy of Kraftwerk’s _Autobahn_ which he held up high to show James. 

“She’s sure to already have it,” said James, who ended up buying it for himself anyway, in order to become better-versed in krautrock. In the end it was Peter who found _Musik von Harmonia_ on vinyl for a great deal more than James wanted to pay but he paid it anyway. Then he walked (though Remus would tell him later it was more like a strut) down the street to Madame Puddifoot’s, leaving Sirius and Remus and Peter down the street under the awning of the record shop in the softly shifting snow. 

\--

Sirius was not to be outdone by James’s securing a girlfriend but it seemed he himself had offended every eligible (non-Slytherin) female at Hogwarts in some way, likely with one of his pranks involving regurgitating toilets, with which he had been nondiscriminatory in the gender of the restroom. As such, because he had trouble sleeping and was lonely, though he would not (could not) admit this, he decided he would attempt a different sort of tactic. 

He tried to remember how the thing with James had started. They had been drinking some horrific stolen booze which might even have been Bubotuber liquor and laughing about something, about some prank or about girls, and then et cetera et cetera, a kiss that began chastely, as a sort of joke, but then it changed. Handjobs were the obvious follow-up. They had never gotten much further than that, and they had stopped kissing, and it became sort of like a favor for each other, and he knew James was picturing someone else, but he was not.

The issue at hand was that Sirius suspected Remus had a crush on him and if such was the case he was poised to act on it. He liked Remus more than most girls anyway and almost as much as he liked James and sometimes he looked at Remus across the breakfast table, or in the Shrieking Shack in the very early morning, and he thought Remus looked very handsome, like a young werewolf George Harrison with straighter teeth. He had about four chest hairs and there was dirt or blood usually under his fingernails and his eyes were a soft hazel-green but always very tired, and he was prone to smart remarks. Remus mostly listened to _Here Come the Warm Jets_ , and he was at the top of the Magical Theory class but was failing potions, and his natural anxiety had dispersed somewhat since they had started him smoking pot. 

As such one Friday night he climbed through Remus’s bed curtains with a joint already rolled and a copy of _Another Green World_ on cassette. Remus was reading his history of magic textbook and he had bewitched his walkman to play “Baby’s on Fire” on an infinite loop. When he saw Sirius with the joint and the tape he said, warily, “What do you want.” 

“Just to talk.” 

James was out with Lily and Peter had a detention that for once was not prank-related, but because he was failing Divination. Sirius watched Remus slowly winnow all this out. Then he sat up (slowly, achingly, because it was almost the full moon) and ejected _Here Come the Warm Jets_ and put _Another Green World_ on, and Sirius sparked the joint with a bit of flame between his fingertips. 

“What do you want to talk about.” 

Sirius exhaled smoke through his nose. “James,” he said. He passed the joint to Remus who took an artful hit. The music was starting to sound really good, and Remus was starting to look not so much like teenage werewolf George Harrison with straighter teeth but like a disgraced young gentleman from an E.M. Forester novel, sent down from Oxford after a scandalous episode. Though Sirius supposed when he thought about it they all could’ve been characters from his works in their own way. 

Remus reached onto his bedside table for his ashtray. “What about James,” he asked. 

“He doesn’t — ” Sirius pressed his thumb between his eyebrows. “He’s got no fucking clue what he’s doing.” 

“Neither do any of us I don’t think. I certainly don’t know how to — to tell somebody that you want them. Without sounding like a lecherous creep. Or throwing yourself at their feet.” 

“James has certainly done both.” 

“Yes, and it worked for him, so. Perhaps you and I are both doing it wrong by trying to be dignified about it.” Remus smiled with a friendly sympathy. “He’s always going to be our friend,” he said. 

“Well yes, I know that.” Remus’s look said, do you really. Or rather, that’s just the problem, isn’t it. But Sirius went on — “You know it’s just jarring when things become different is all.” 

“Yes. It is.” 

“Or when you look at something and you realize — it’s been different the whole time than you’ve imagined.” 

How to reroute this unexpectedly sincere conversation into seduction, he was thinking. Would Remus want to jerk each other off and kiss or would he be interested in other pursuits? And precisely what might those other pursuits be? Sirius considered himself as versed in sex as the next sixteen year old but he was beginning to realize he might be out of his depth. Perhaps it was just the pot and the weirdness of the music and the way Remus’s mouth was moving. 

“ — magical memory theory is, you know, a lot more esoteric than I’m used to, and I’ve only found like, two books about it so — ” 

He wasn’t sure how Remus had even gotten on this subject but he thought he could take it no more so he leant forward and kissed him and they bumped heads. Remus had, evidently, been eating an orange not long ago. His eyes were softly closed. Very nervously he raised his hands to Sirius’s shoulders and Sirius could feel the simmering point of heat, the ember of the joint he still held between two fingers — it went on for a while, and it was wet and kind of sweet, and after some indeterminable time he kind of pressed Remus back toward the headboard of the bed, at which point Remus dropped the joint onto his own bare belly where his shirt had rucked up and they were obliged to stop kissing because he had burnt himself. 

The tape had come to the end of the side but neither of them would flip it. Remus sat up again. “Is this about — you and James.” 

“Who says it’s about — ”

“It’s what you were talking about not two seconds before. And I — well I am a very light sleeper.” 

Sirius had expected this but still feigned surprise. “It isn’t about James at all.” 

“What is it about.” 

“I like you and — ”

“Do you really.” 

Remus had healed the little red burn with a spell and he shifted his shirt down again and the sight of just a wedge of pale soft skin at his stomach had become suddenly something Sirius could not bear. 

“I do,” he said. 

“You’re jealous,” Remus said, but he looked and sounded almost like he was about to cry, “and frightened, and lonely.” 

“That’s unfair to — ”

“But it’s true.” 

Sirius, who could not deny that, rerouted to something he thought would be similarly cutting. “At least I have the, the balls to give it a shot.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean.” 

“You know what it means,” said Sirius, through his teeth. “I know you — and if you were lying here, you know, _listening_ — ” 

“Fuck off,” said Remus, almost hissing, “fuck off. You can’t come in here and ask, oh dear Moony, will you please be a dear and replace James as my circle-jerk buddy, after all I know you are sympathetic to the circumstances of my rejection, and I know you’re in love with me…” 

“You’re not,” said Sirius, because it seemed like some grave mistake, like a sort of very bad path Remus had gone down, like he had started shooting heroin or something, “you’re not, I mean, in love with me, Moony.” 

“Fuck off,” Remus said again. “Get out of my bed.” 

Sirius looked at him, and at his mouth which was warm and pink and tasted like oranges, and his hair which was disheveled where Sirius had touched it, and the sleeve of his t-shirt was pushed up onto his shoulder, showing the sharp vivid button of the bone and the old scar across it. 

“Get,” Remus said, “out.” 

So Sirius did. He went back to his own bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the humming of the silencing charm Remus had put up wondering what exactly he was doing behind it, and waited for James and Peter to come back. 

\--

Three days later Sirius’s nerves weren’t entirely repaired from it all and he felt vaguely as if he had been scraped against a chalkboard or something, and he couldn’t summon much of an appetite and had skipped several classes and his trouble sleeping was worse than he thought it had ever been, and when he managed to sleep he had terrible dreams. As such when he ran into Snape in the hallway entirely on purpose he allowed himself to be goaded. Later he would not remember clearly exactly what he had said but he remembered that he felt he had truly gotten one over on Snivellus at last and as such he went back up the dorm and lay on his back in his bed with his arms crossed behind his head listening to _Exile on Main Street,_ feeling relatively like a cool badass, and feeling like if his friends didn’t want him then it was their problem with which he should not trouble himself. 

\--

He woke up around two or three in the morning when James who smelled wild and like snow and blood parted the his bed curtains with a tearing sort of violence and before Sirius could so much as get his wits about him enough to entertain it as something it was not grasped him by the collar of his shirt and pulled up hard. 

“What the fuck did you say!” 

“What did I — ”

James’s nose and fingers were very cold, and he was breathing like he had run very fast and very far, and perhaps he had been crying not so long ago, or perhaps it was just the wind outside having stung at his eyes enough to make them red and wet. “What the fuck,” he said, slowly, “is wrong with you.” And he loosened his grasp on Sirius’s collar with a slow disgust. 

He could not even conceive of what he had apparently done which he sensed was part and parcel of James’s frustration. He must have said something to upset Lily, he reasoned, but he couldn't for the life of him suppose what that might be. Perhaps she was upset about whatever it was he’d said to — 

\--

In the next few days he was called before McGonagall, and Dumbledore, and most of the school board of directors, and James refused to talk to him, even to tell him how Remus was doing (which could not have been very good, because Remus didn’t come to class) and so Peter also did on principle, and so did Lily and all the girls, and even Kingsley and Dearborn and the Prewitts picked up that he had done something nigh on Unforgivable and as such they too ignored him. At meals he was obliged to sit with the first years down the end of the table and even they scooted away from him and whispered quietly to themselves with vague glances in his general direction though perhaps that was simply because they were confused by his presence. 

He skipped most of his classes and sat outside the hospital wing occasionally sneaking off for cigarettes. James and Peter and even Lily and Dorcas came and went a few times and once he tried to slip in with them but was shoved out of the door by Madame Pomfrey. At last she came raving out and as good as chased him off with a broom like a feral cat. For a while he stalked the corridors until he ran into McGonagall who told him if he didn’t go to class certainly he would be expelled. “After all the allowances we have made for you, Mr. Black.” She wanted badly to grab him by the earlobe and drag him to Divination, he could tell, and part of him wanted her to, almost desperately. 

\--

When Remus had missed four days of class which was unheard-of and certainly confirmed Sirius’s darkest suspicions he was catatonic or barely alive he stole James’s invisibility cloak and went to the hospital wing under cover of darkness. In the long cavernous room with which he was unfortunately familiar only one bed was occupied, and the curtains drawn around it, and the pale waning moonlight through the far window cast a kind of soft blue pattern upon all the while fabric and upon the floor. 

He was not certain what he was expecting to see. Something from a Muggle hospital drama. Like they would have Remus wrapped head to toe in bandages and plugged full of tubes supplying his ravaged body with blood and fluids. Or like they would have tied him down upon the bed with magically enforced straps against his ravening, grief-strengthened madness. 

Instead it was just Remus in the bed, and he was not sleeping. He was sitting up, and there was half an applesauce on the side table which he had not finished. He appeared very much to have been waiting for Sirius and as such when the curtains opened and Sirius shed the invisibility cloak Remus did not look at all startled. He was wearing one of the soft blue hospital gowns and he had piled the sheets and blankets in his lap but where his skin was visible it was either bandaged in white gauze or it looked like he had shoved it in a Muggle garbage disposal. The wounds were vaguely greasy with one of Pomfrey’s ointments which appeared to be having positively no healing effect. Sirius wanted to take his hands, but he had hidden them in the folds of the blankets. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Remus said. Or not so much said because he had no voice. “What took you so fucking long.” 

Sirius opened his mouth and nothing came out. So Remus kept going. His voice was like glacial ice scraping over stone. 

“I can’t go to class,” he said, “if I go to class everyone will know. We have O.W.L.’s in three months and I’m going to fail everything.” 

“You’re not going to — you won’t fail anything. If you do I’ll fail it with you. I haven’t gone to class all week.” 

“James said he thought they would expel you.” 

“James is — he overreacts.” 

“Does he.” 

Remus pulled one of his hands free from the blankets to itch the top of his forearm. It didn’t look so much like a hand so bandaged was it and all his fingernails were gone. 

“Let me,” said Sirius. He had started crying and Remus looked at him with a kind of deep disappointment in his patheticness. The worst of the wounds, Sirius had decided, was the one that split through his lips. “Where do you itch,” he said, “I’ll itch for you.” 

Remus pointed at the edge of the bandage on his forearm and Sirius itched there careful because his fingernails were ragged. Gently and more like rubbing than like itching. Careful not to tear or snag anything that was fragile. Then Remus pointed to a place on his shoulder, then high on his back. 

“I thought you liked me,” Remus said. “I was going to let you — if you tried one more time.” 

“I do like you.” 

“Why would you do that if you liked me.” 

“I didn’t — I wasn’t thinking.” 

“You never fucking are. Do you know that? You never think at all. I don’t know how you’re still alive.” 

He shifted in the blankets and stretched out his leg; his thigh was wrapped tightly in a bandage which had begun to stain a crepuscular red-yellow in the shape of a tearing lupine mouth. Sirius made a stupid sound, like a little cry. “Moony…” 

“What,” Remus said. “It’ll match the other one.” He pointed at the edge of the bandage toward the scabby bony bruised round of his knee. “It’s the tape I think. It itches like hell.” 

Lastly he lifted his right foot. There was a little raw place just beside his heel that he had Sirius scratch for him. 

“I can’t — how long did you spend learning how to do the dog for me? You read like, a whole ancient book.” 

“Three months,” said Sirius. “And it wasn’t that ancient. 1642.” 

“Even my parents did this, you know,” Remus said. “Oh honey, we love you, we love all of you, no matter what.” 

“But they — ”

“I don’t love all of me,” Remus said. “I don’t want all of me to be loved. I hate that fucking thing. Obviously.” 

“I know you hate it,” Sirius told him. “I hate it — ”

“It's funny how it can be part of me or not in your mind depending on what best suits you,” Remus hissed. “I have to live with it every fucking day. Don’t you get it? If I — if I killed Snape, because that was what you wanted — would you still — ” 

Remus was crying now but his voice stayed very steady and his eyes were very cold and pale like lichen upon stone. Pain (physical and otherwise) had made him still and hollow. 

“They would’ve sent me to — like to Azkaban. Or worse. There are worse places.” 

“They couldn’t — you’re not even of age.” 

“Do you think it matters?” He pressed his palm across his face to blur the tears. “Would you still want to be my friend if I killed someone?” 

Sirius just nodded, because if he opened his mouth he would scream, or something. 

“Liar.” 

“I mean it.” His voice sounded garbled, like a distant transmission. “I was just trying — Remus, to scare him.” 

“What’s scarier than a real live fucking werewolf.” 

Being, he thought, did not say, in my mind, right now. He felt like a worse monster. He after all had clawed himself to comparable pieces over the past few days but his were internal and thus of course they were invisible. And thus of course they may as well have not existed at all. 

“Stop fucking crying,” Remus said. He had leant back again against his pile of pillows, and in the moonlight he looked like a martyred saint. “Go to the kitchens and get me a mince pie.” 

Sirius thought he might’ve attempted to drag the moon out of the sky if Remus had asked. He would’ve shaped all the sticky meat of it into a token for Remus to wear on a necklace. He would’ve burned something to the ground and indeed very much later in Shropshire when they were twenty-one and hated each other with love he very nearly did. 

Instead he went to the kitchens and the house-elves helped him fill a bag with mince pies and sweets and curries and the cheese danishes Remus liked and then they put some of their weirdo flash-bang magic on it to keep all the food fresh. They could tell that Sirius had been crying and as such they offered him all sorts of delicious things but he felt also on the immediate verge of vomiting upon the very sight of food so he thanked them profusely and left. When he got back to the hospital wing Remus had fallen asleep against the pile of pillows and Sirius sat again in the chair beside the bed. After a while he reached out and tucked a wayward strand of Remus’s hair behind his ear. He fixed with magic the places were the bandages were peeling up, and then he sat very still and waited, perhaps for the dawn, or perhaps to be forgiven, of perhaps for something else entire, which he could not name, which he understood already then would be even longer in coming. 


	2. things you said when we were the happiest we ever were

June 1978. Sirius woke up just past noon looking at the nape of Remus’s neck, which was sunburnt, and the fine hairs had curled artfully to the left, showing a constellation of freckles and the whitish mark of an old scar; in the night the air conditioning charms they had cast had failed and as such they had thrown all the blankets off the bed onto the floor, which was scattered with books (spines broken) and records and tapes and clothing and posters they had not yet hung up. They had moved in not two weeks previous. Remus was naked and there was a purpling bite-mark bruise on his ass and he had colored in two of his fingernails with sharpie and had slammed another one in the door of their moving van and it was still purplish, and in his sleep with a shocking clarity he said, “Aladdin Sane.” 

As such Sirius got up and found his shirt on the floor and crept into the other room were the sunlight was coming in with a rare vividness upon the stained hardwoods such that even the hideous beige formica of their kitchen counters looked blessed or saintly. On the turntable the night previous they had been playing a Brian Eno record as they often did upon carnal occasions but Sirius put it away and put on Bowie’s _Station to Station_. He liked the title track very much particularly when Bowie sang “it’s not the side effects of the cocaine… I am thinking that it must be love…” which lately had been playing in his mind on a sort of infinite static loop, but he skipped it and put on “Golden Years.” Then he went and put water on for tea and whilst he waited for it to boil he could not help but dance with himself a kind of pathetic two step. _Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere, angel…_

He remembered when he had first heard a record by Bowie, probably second year at Hogwarts; Remus had supplied it ( _Hunky Dory_ ), because his father was a fan, and Sirius had felt like someone was reaching for him out of another world, one which he had never seen nor paid much credence to. A pale beringed hand was reaching out and there was music and dancing, and laughter, and he took it. A seduction by faerie, or something else out of his Magical Mythology textbook. 

It was like something that made a lot of sense but he had never thought about in much depth before which was the same way it had felt on the last day of sixth year when Remus kissed him. 

Sirius cast the spell that would put “Golden Years” on repeat until it was lifted and then he tied his hair up and lit a cigarette and decided he would try to make a frittata. The previous day at the Muggle supermarket down the street they had walked around together for about a half hour in silent confusion and blinding awe and at last they had purchased several things they thought would be useful. At the register Remus had looked at him for just a moment with a pure and brutal shock of fear but Sirius had paid for everything and they hadn’t talked about it. 

He had cut up some bacon and was frying it with Swiss chard when Remus came in from the bedroom yawning in his swim trunks and sat at the kitchen table and stole one of Sirius’s cigarettes. 

“Going bathing are we?” 

“I couldn’t find — I think I need to do laundry.” There was another hickey high on his ribcage almost in his armpit and looking at it Sirius started feeling kind of hot. His hair was a mess and the sunlight through the window was so bright and pure as to blur out his scars except when he shifted. “What are you making?” 

“A frittata.” 

Remus smiled kind of with a wild joy. “Do you have like the slightest fucking clue what you’re doing.” 

Sirius pretended to be affronted and shocked by such a suggestion and Remus laughed and then he got up again and went in the bedroom and rolled them a joint and they got so far as to get the cast iron skillet in the oven and put on _Diamond Dogs_ before Sirius backed Remus up against the counter and events took a customary turn and they only realized the frittata was burning when the fire alarm went off. 

“It’s your fault I suppose,” Sirius said, as they went around the flat opening all the windows. 

“How is it my fault.” 

“You came strolling in the kitchen in your ridiculous bathing suit unshowered like and it was your fault that we got stoned.” 

Remus scoffed or something and threw himself down on the sofa with his knees just apart. 

“Stop that,” Sirius told him. “I’m starving and you’ve ruined my frittata.” 

“Make me another one.” 

“I’ve lost my taste for it now. You ought to go down to the bakery.” 

He sat down beside Remus on the couch and wrapped the far panel of his ribs in his hand feeling the breath and the heartbeat or perhaps his own heartbeat or perhaps both their heartbeats at once. Remus pressed his tongue against his lower lip. 

“I think you ought to go out and go to the bakery,” Sirius said again, “and also buy me the new Magazine record.” 

“I haven’t got any clean clothes.” 

“Wear something of mine,” Sirius said casually, as though this didn’t make him feel kind of happy-shivery, like being drunk and high at the same time, or the first time he had heard Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” 

“Neither have you.” 

“Dig something out of the — ”

“I am not, yet, Sirius, so depraved that I will go out to the fancy fucking bakery in clothes with come stains on.” 

“They’ll just see a sweet boy,” Sirius said, tracing, almost whispering, Remus’s bones and scars, the weirdo starmap of his freckles, “that sweet-faced young man from down the road and they won’t know a thing, you know, about what I know.” 

Remus’s almost-smile was warm and stoned and a little tentative. “What might you think you know.” 

Sirius leaned forward and whispered it in his ear. When he pulled back Remus was smiling for real. He said “Perhaps true.” 

In a little while Remus went down the street to the bakery, and he bought a few croissants and French macaroons, and then he went to the record store where he purchased Magazine’s new record on cassette because he could not afford the vinyl, and when he got home they put it on and ate licking pastry flakes from one another’s fingers and corners of lips and then fucked on the floor in the pale afternoon. Much later whilst Remus straightened their vinyl collection Sirius scraped the burnt-black frittata wreckage from the cast-iron skillet with magic and a ball of steel wool. 

Later he would forget what he had said. Likely it wasn’t anything of much importance. Later he would think of this summer as the sort of alpha and the omega of something very much larger. At the time it had just seemed like that Bowie song: “I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years… nothing’s gonna touch you in these golden years…” 


	3. things you said after you kissed me

“Whoops,” said Marlene. 

Her face was very close. Thudding under Dorcas’s feet the bass. They had come out back before Gang of Four’s set to do a bump off the keys to Marlene’s Marylebone flat. Dorcas hadn’t done coke since Yule Ball seventh year at Hogwarts and then had spent the night sitting on the cold tile of the likely haunted girls’ room in the Divination tower intermittently vomiting and spouting off hyper-caffeinated nonsense (aimed generally in the direction of Lily and Molly, who were sitting sympathetically outside her stall, sharing a joint and occasionally offering rebuttals or nonsensical rejoinders) with regard to the Wurzburg witch trial and subsequent executions, a subject she later studied for three months in the Magical History graduate program at St. Andrews’ until she was obliged to quit grad school to join the Order. But of late she had found it very difficult not to do things Marlene asked. 

Before they met up for the gig Marlene had been out for drinks with one of the Boneses which had made Dorcas vaguely jealous. She herself had been out with Lupin because he had offered to take her shift watching over the reliquary at St. Katherine’s if she bought him dinner. They had split a curry and talked about Kate Bush. Lupin was looking nervous about something, because it was almost the full moon and he thought she didn’t know he was a werewolf. Dorcas was thinking about Marlene with the Bones girl, who was very skinny and had a stylish haircut and wore stylish clothes. Dorcas herself had lost weight of late but only because she had neither the time nor money nor appetite to eat much and she thought on her frame it looked mostly like a sort of lack. Like a piece missing. She wondered if it reflected her inside.

Marlene’s mouth tasted like a bad gin and tonic and the lime was still in her lips as though she had bitten straight into it. “Sorry,” she said. Her eyes were big and dark and she could not tear them from Dorcas’s face, from her lips and her collar, and it felt like being looked at by a portrait in a museum, when its frozen and still gaze seemed to follow you around the room. “I’m sorry,” Marlene said again. 

“What are you — it’s alright.” Dorcas pressed the back of her hand against her mouth not so much as to diffuse the taste of it but to keep it — to seal it in. The lime and the bitter quinine and her warmth — a Marlene-taste like sage and cigarettes, and milky over-sweet Darjeeling. She felt almost dizzy. “It’s alright.” 

“I didn’t,” Marlene started, but then she stopped. Dorcas looked up, and their eyes met. After however long they had known each other this look was still — she couldn’t read it. She supposed it was just that Marlene did not make a habit of appearing vulnerable. 

“I should hope,” Dorcas said. A whole tangle of words compiled like way deep in her gut so far from her mouth they were useless and she figured anyway if she let them out it would just be a very long and very loud scream. Like a kind of hysterical battle cry. “I should hope you meant it.” 

“I did,” said Marlene, emboldened. The frizz of her blonde hair was like a halo and in it beads of fog caught the streetlight shining and prismatic and containing small worlds. “You look nice.” 

“I cut my bangs crooked.” 

And my face, she thought, is like a skeleton’s face, and my clothes don’t fit, and you can see in my eyes, like the mirror through into what I know. I look haunted and hunted and hollow but really at the heart of it I am just a whole creature made of wanting. 

“I didn’t notice,” said Marlene. 

“I was a bit drunk. But I couldn’t — you remember that evening in Shrewsbury. I couldn’t quite see. But I shouldn’t talk about the war.” As though whatever happened from here wouldn’t in some capacity be talking about the war. “You should kiss me again.” 

Marlene did. This time she pressed her thigh (leather skirt) close and tight between Dorcas’s legs. Her mouth was soft and the more Dorcas kissed it the more it tasted like sage, and between them the kissing sound was like something else coming slowly, breathing, to life. Kindled like a kind of secret flame in the darkness. 

When they pulled apart she almost said, we don’t have to go to the gig. We can go back to my place or yours right now. We can get a bottle of wine on the way and then you can fuck me any/every which way now and forever til the end of time amen. After all perhaps the end of time was coming right around the corner. Her hand against Marlene’s back right at the waist of her skirt tightened; I will not, she thought, I will not let go. 

They went inside and watched the gig and she did not let go and eventually Marlene put her hand in the back pocket of her jeans. Then they walked home together. It was silent on the street, and raining, and they shared a cigarette, and they laughed, and at a crosswalk in the darkness they kissed again, devouringly, reaching, shoving, like they could crawl into each other, and at Dorcas’s flat on her bare mattress on the floor they attempted as such until the dawn listening to Wire and X and Pylon, naked in the shadow thrown from the candles. Marlene touched her with a sort of electric brazenness where she did not dare to look at herself in the mirror. 

Do not take this from me, she thought, after, while she laid awake, and Marlene slept. If you take this from me I will seize every available vengeance and you will fear the sound of my name. Your children’s children’s children will tell stories about the shade of me in a black dress manifesting a plague upon your lands. I will eat your magic up into my belly. I will be a witch you cannot ever burn… 

She thought about it until Marlene woke up and pinched her nipple and pressed her face into her neck. Then she forgot about it for a while, and they got up and dressed in each other’s clothes from the floor, and made tea on the hotplate, and laughed about the whole thing together at the kitchen table. 


	4. things you said too quietly

He knew it would happen sooner or later and indeed in the autumn of 1979 he arrived at Malfoy Manor via a Portkey from London with Dolohov and the Carrows, and they went into the grand ballroom which had been dressed accordingly for the company with sweeping black velvet drapery, and sitting at the head table at Bellatrix’s left hand was none other than his brother’s stupidest “friend,” Peter Pettigrew. Evidently this was the spy in the Order who had been mentioned in repeated cagey whispers by most of the Dark Lord’s innermost circle, to whom Regulus was privy only when they had a message to deliver or some bizarre sexual whim they thought he might satisfy if he was sufficiently coked up. Which of course usually he would; he enjoyed cocaine, and he enjoyed secrets, and he enjoyed being pushed around a little during sex, which they all relished. 

Regulus sat with Dolohov and the Carrows at a close-by table so that he could observe without turning his head, and a contingent of several house-elves bustled around them to serve an amuse-bouche (nearly-raw, shave-thin cuts of green-tinged dragon steak upon a bed of twitching greens and black flowers, just edible enough that their poison would only turn your tongue numb) and neatly pour liberal helpings of a fragrant red wine so blood-dark as to seem like ink. At Bellatrix’s right was an empty chair the Dark Lord would fill if he showed, which Pettigrew kept glancing at in a way he probably didn’t intend to seem fearful, but which was. The emotion Regulus could read most accurately on others’ faces was fear. 

Dolohov bummed him a cigarette and he watched. He was not so hungry and the conversation was dull, as per usual; since he had left school midway through his fifth year and received the Dark Mark not long subsequently the general topics of Death Eater conversation had been much the same, and Regulus, who had been overhearing proposals of mass Muggle murder at the dinner table since he was about seven years old, found himself continually unfazed. He had also found, rather early on, that all this stuff was rather easier to swallow and nod one’s head along with when it was purely hypothetical. 

Alecto leant over the table toward Regulus; already her lips were purple-dark with wine. “Doughboy over there with Bellatrix — he was one of your blood-traitor brother’s Hogwarts pals, was he not?” 

“He was.” 

“Are you surprised?” 

Regulus was not, but he did not say so. He cocked an eyebrow and pressed his cigarette out in one of the black flowers. 

\--

Voldemort did not show, which was predictable, and Lucius Malfoy gave one of his typically long-winded thundering speeches, and assorted Death Eaters in attendance reported on their magnificent deeds, and at last they were dismissed around midnight. Regulus elected not to take the return Portkey with Dolohov and the Carrows and instead he followed Pettigrew into the garden, where he jumped when Regulus grasped his shoulder. 

He smiled his smile he knew was the most like Sirius. “Fancy a drink?” 

They Apparated together very near Regulus’s flat in Peckham around back of a bar he’d been to several times before on assorted other missions for secrets; it was dark and candlelit, the whiskey was bad, the beer was worse, and no one looked twice at one another. Regulus went to the bar for another bottle of wine while Pettigrew pressed himself as deep as he could manage into the shadows at their back corner table. 

“If anyone saw me here with you,” Pettigrew started, but then he stopped. 

“No one will. Hardly any of our sort live in Peckham.” 

“Our sort.” 

“Wizards. Pure-blood wizards.” He poured them both glasses of wine. “Where does my brother live?” 

“Camden Town. With Lupin.” 

“Ah.” 

“I can get the address for you — ”

“There’s no need.” 

Pettigrew had stilled across the table like a skittish animal in headlights. “I thought,” he said, “you hated him.” 

Regulus, in fact, did not; hating family members was more Sirius’s game. Sirius had been and remained altogether an exhausting and horrible older brother who had not done a kind thing for Regulus since he was thirteen years old, but Regulus could summon neither the energy nor the care to hate him. 

“Would you like him to die?” Regulus asked, by way of an answer. Pettigrew didn’t say anything. “Or Lupin, perhaps? Either of them?” 

He muttered something into his wine glass Regulus couldn’t make out. 

“Or perhaps the Potters?” 

The sweet chubby face turned white then swiftly red again, almost comically. 

“The Dark Lord has a plan,” Regulus said, though he didn’t know yet quite what it was. He had structured the bones of it in his own mind with information drawn from his diverse array of sources because he understood to write any of it down would certainly be suicide. “It would be a grievous disservice if we were to kill any of them now.” 

“Right,” said Pettigrew. 

“Patience is a virtue,” Regulus told him; it was the same mantra he had been repeating to himself for perhaps a year. 

\--

They went back up to Regulus’s flat. It turned out Pettigrew fucked like a rabbit, which made sense, because he didn’t look much unlike one. He understood this was symbolic, and that Pettigrew was imagining he had longer hair and broader shoulders; that he was a version of his brother that could be conquered, or subjugated, or possessed. As though fucking were a pure indication of any of the above — as though Sirius himself couldn’t be manipulated by other means. Afterward Pettigrew passed out and Regulus went in the bathroom and cleaned himself and showered and brushed his teeth. He was already dreading having to keep this whole charade up, because there was more information he needed from Pettigrew, but he supposed it wouldn’t be the worst of all he had been up to recently; after all he had let Theodore Nott, who was like seventy years old, come on his face in return for information about Horcruxes. 

\--

When he woke up in the morning Pettigrew was gone; _thank God_ , Regulus thought, and he made a cup of tea and some toast and put a record on, but then Pettigrew sent an owl. 

_Black — Would appreciate your best discretion with regard to this matter if at all possible. My work within the Order is vital to secure the success of our cause and I cannot allow anything to jeopardize it. I was drunk and should not have — but anyway you probably know this. — P.P._

This was altogether extremely stupid, as the Order had been known to read owls. Regulus burned the letter and wrote his own which was rather floral and nauseating re: his ravening carnal desire. 

\--

Regulus Apparated to the magical library in Edinburgh and befuddled the attendant to let him into the Dark section without a note from a professor and read what he could about Horcruxes from books that moaned and screamed and tried to bite him, and then he went around to Grimmauld Place when he knew his mother would be out visiting his father at St. Mungo’s and tried to talk to Kreacher, who since the Event had hidden under the boiler in the basement and refused to come out, and then he went, rather brazenly, he thought, to Pettigrew’s place in Shepherd’s Bush. Pettigrew pulled him inside and berated him on the subject even as Regulus pushed him against the wall and knelt and undid the placket of his pants and his belt, and in fact he only shut up when Regulus deep-throated him. This is easy, he thought abstractly. He swallowed when Pettigrew came, and then they had a cup of tea, and then he washed all the dishes piled in the sink. This, possibly, was even more seductive to Pettigrew than the sex, and certainly it was more enjoyable, because Regulus liked washing dishes (it was still a sort of novelty to him after his childhood, and it made him feel like a real adult), and couldn’t stand clutter. 

They went down the hall and in Pettigrew’s unmade bed Regulus allowed his ass to be fucked once more in a sort of passionate jackhammer style. This time it seemed Pettigrew was intent, at least at first, on making him come, but eventually he gave up, or perhaps he believed himself successful, as Regulus made a lot of fake sounds of intense pleasure. 

Afterwards Regulus rolled a joint on top of the copy of _On the Road_ that Pettigrew pretentiously kept on his bedside tablet. He himself was ambivalent about marijuana but found that it loosened his subjects’ tongues, and indeed Pettigrew was no exception:

“I am trying,” Pettigrew said, “to convince them it’s Lupin. The spy, I mean.” 

Regulus had wondered. “How’s that going for you?” 

“Better than I thought. You know I doubted Sirius would buy it. But I think — you know, with everything. It becomes more and more feasible, I suppose.” 

Regulus had not interacted much with Lupin in school because all of Slytherin house had expostulated with varying whispers and jeers about his obvious werewolfness and air of tragedy. Sirius had long spoken of Lupin with a confused admiration and Regulus had begun to read between the lines of it. He was unsurprised but disappointed at Sirius’s taste; it seemed to him Lupin looked sort of like a young George Harrison, except not attractive. 

“With all of Greyback’s nonsense, you mean?” 

“Well that and — all of the, you know, the work of it.” 

He meant the killings. All the blood and the vivid green spell above the houses. He was staring at the place it was tattooed inside Regulus’s arm with tantamount fear and jealousy. As he had not been recently summoned by Voldemort it was all but invisible but all Pettigrew needed was the suggestion of its existence. To Regulus it felt rather like an old bee sting. 

“Greyback wants Lupin desperately,” Regulus said, to see what would happen, “like, he wants to break him, like a horse or something; you know he talks about it nearly nonstop.” 

“Well he can have him,” said Pettigrew, “as far as I’m concerned. But I do not think it is the Dark Lord’s plan.” 

Regulus knew this already, because the Dark Lord’s plan was simply to sit back and let the Order eat themselves from the inside, and he had already set the ball of it rolling, and now all he had to do was wait. There were already enough internal fractures between them all, because the majority of them had been out of Hogwarts not longer than two years and thought they were hot shit but could not cast a corporeal Patronus, and they had all slept with each other. And Sirius, who thought every single thing he felt was sacred and inviolable, who believed in absolutes and had a tendency for wild distrusts, had fallen in love with a Dark creature. 

“Perhaps afterward,” said Pettigrew, because he was thinking about it. There was a twitch of a nervous smile on his face like in relief he was finally allowed to consider this possibility — trussing up one of his closest school chums in red ribbons and handing him over to the most savage known living werewolf. “After all of this is over.” 

Later, after Pettigrew fell asleep, Regulus went to shower, and he thought perhaps this whole thing boiled down to that same cold stone it had boiled down to for every single Death Eater in one way or another; Pettigrew had thought himself deserving of something on account of his pure blood, but then another (polluted and sick and rotten and ripped-up inside and outside) had usurped it from him before he could even really have tasted it. 

\--

He was obliged to visit a jewelry store in Camden Town and afterwards he went for a walk around the neighborhood not really looking or hoping for much. He did not know what he would say to his brother if they saw each other. Perhaps simply, I am about to attempt something which will one-part end this and as such you may not see me again. Perhaps simply, beware the rat. Beware the sickness it carries. But it was likely his brother would publicly hex him on sight before any meaningful exchange of information could occur. 

He did not think he quite missed when they were children together, and they would sit together in one of their bedrooms listening to their parents fighting from downstairs, and Sirius discovered the Rolling Stones, and Regulus thought it was interesting. Sneaking sweets and listening to Quidditch on the wireless and then trying with magic to tune it to Muggle stations even though between them they knew perhaps four spells. He did not miss being a child, and sometimes he wondered if this was perhaps indicative of some mental issue; after all he knew his father was dying and couldn’t be bothered.

He sometimes wondered if Sirius had gotten all the feelings that were supposed to be allotted between the two of them. He was altogether grateful for this, he supposed, because it allowed him to do what was necessary. 

As he walked through Camden Town he noted several of the buildings had a sort of magical signature about them indicating wards or alarm systems, and one of them felt familiar, warm and wild like a clove cigarette. It was an old brick tenement on a street corner with two floors of apartments above a butcher shop, and on the third floor the shades were tightly drawn, and there was a kind of birdcage on the roof, and on the wrought-iron fire escape were a few dying plants, and it all felt quiet and hushed and still, like something about it would break if disturbed. As such Regulus turned on his heel and walked back quickly toward the Tube. 

\--

He went to Grimmauld Place and found Kreacher had managed to make his way out from under the boiler. The place smelled like hospital and had not been tidied for months but it was unlikely anyone had noticed. The house-elf was sitting on a filthy cushion by some of the Black family’s more secretive heirlooms which required to be stored in the basement against prying eyes. “Y-young master,” Kreacher said when he saw Regulus, but he was wavery on his feet when he stood. 

Regulus crouched to his level like to a small child or a dog. “Do you think you’re well enough — can you take me to that place, Kreacher?” 

“Why would you — ” He let out a large and pathetic sob. “Whyever would you want to go to that place!” 

“We’re going to ruin it and break it.” 

“We cannot — you cannot do such a thing!” 

He supposed, like his brother, he had always viewed this statement as a sort of challenge. He took the necklace from the pocket of his coat and showed Kreacher. “Was it like this?” 

The house-elf said nothing. He watched Regulus warily as if this was some kind of trap. 

“I’ve written a note to go inside it. Whatever happens you’re to swap them out and destroy the real one.” 

“Young master — ”

“That’s an order. Okay?” 

He didn’t like saying it, and Kreacher didn’t like hearing it. His heart was beating up in his throat like a steel drum and he thought, here is my debutante performance — here is my revision to the Dark Lord’s plan for me. Here is my fulfillment of the virtue that is patience. 

Here is one part of the end of this. Here is my submission for death and immortality. 

He reached out and grasped Kreacher’s hand and they disappeared. Before he opened his eyes he could smell the sea, and the wind was quick and cold and bracing off the headland. The place had a sort of footprint of bad things on it such that he himself had spent three years now putting on other places. When I get back to London, he thought, I will tell my brother. 


	5. things you said that made me feel like shit

Remus arrived back in London from the Pennines past midnight and was obliged to walk from the Ministry’s Apparition chambers back to his and Sirius’s flat in Camden Town because it was so late the tube had stopped running and he and Sirius had warded their entire building to hell after Dearborn’s disappearance such that no one could Apparate within six blocks of it. Besides the night was cool and the fog was light and he was stiff from running all the night previous and his blood still felt almost residually electric, or over-warm. Possessed by the moon which sat now, shrinking, blurred through a bank of cloud. There was still something disgusting in his teeth he tried to pick out at a streetlight but his fingernails were too short and ragged. 

He had spent the full moon the previous night with a friendly werewolf pack mostly composed of women and young children, and they had agreed to ally with the Order however they could, and in the morning they had made sausages and eggs together in a cast iron skillet over a campfire and traded ancient legends. There had been times in school when he had not hated his other skin and other self and he had woken up in the morning in the Shack feeling very alive, except his arm was numb because it was under Sirius’s dog body, and then he had wondered exactly what that said about him. He supposed this was another such instance but things had gone altogether too horrible for him to challenge the only thing for which he was valuable. The only methodology by which he could hope to alter the course of all the endless and compounding war, in whatever small way… 

In the flat, beyond all the wards, it was very warm, and Sirius had left the light above the stove on, and there were rolls in the breadbasket and cold chicken in the fridge. Remus ate quickly and ravenously and in their dingy bathroom he washed his face and brushed his teeth and tried in vain to get the dirt out of from under his fingernails, and then he went tip-toeing in the bedroom. In the pale shred of light through the drawn shades Sirius half-woke and turned on his back. His hair was loose and needed a cut; the sight of him like this, half-asleep and soft-edged, always made Remus’s mouth dry up. “‘lo,” he said, on a yawn. “Hello Moony.” 

“Hi.” 

He sat on the edge of the bed to take his boots and socks off and Sirius pressed a sleepy open hand against the small of his back. 

“How was it?” 

“Good this time.”

Sirius wrapped an arm around his torso like it would make him take his boots off faster. 

“Very good,” Remus said, mostly to himself. The gauzy streetlight from the window across the floor. Times like this he thought about how even though everything was horrible he still had a home and a partner and could feed himself, and that he was twenty years old, and that 24% of werewolves turned before age 6 were dead before age 19. “We’ll talk about it in the morning,” he told Sirius, who had fallen asleep again. 

\--

He woke after what felt like the blink of an eye, and it was dawn, and he was being kissed. It was almost like still dreaming; he couldn’t keep his eyes quite open, and everything happened so slowly sometimes he drifted and he thought they were together in a deep woods, and Sirius hovered above him, and the strands of his hair were cool and soft, and behind him in the forest canopy the light came in weak but crowning in a vivid platinum ring… but Sirius in fact was closer, and he sucked a bright warm bruise into Remus’s neck, and Remus opened his eyes into the room — 

Sometimes their sex felt like everything its right place, and it made a kind of tremendous anatomical sense, as though quite simply the reason he could not remember feeling at home in his body was that Sirius was not there. In fact it seemed very obvious that this was true, because he could feel Sirius’s heartbeat and his own, just offset like abstract drumming, and they had no need to speak to each other, because there was a language between them that was unwritten and gestural, something very ancient and inscribed upon their bones, some secret encoded as a kind of cipher in breath, and as such at the very last Sirius wrapped Remus’s throat in his hand with his thumb high up against the pulse madly fluttering inside him like a trapped bird and pressed in deep until he came. 

\--

Hours later perhaps he managed to drag himself forth from bed and into the kitchen where Sirius was reading the _Prophet_. There were eggs and toast on the stove Sirius had kept warm with a spell but Remus set about boiling a new kettle for tea. Sirius pretended to read the paper but instead watched him in a manner he likely thought was surreptitious. 

“You’ve a hickey on your neck,” Sirius said when Remus sat down. 

He could feel it like a twinge of a burn when he turned to watch at the birds in the window. 

“At least it’s not like a big kinky choke bruise.” 

Sirius smiled in the lecherous corner of his mouth, and he folded the paper. “You enjoy that, though,” he said, “I know.” 

Remus, who did, very much, said nothing. He looked at his plate and noticed that Sirius had prepared the eggs as he himself liked them, which was very runny, and the toast as he himself liked it, which was hardly toast at all. It was typical of Sirius; perhaps he enjoyed all his food undercooked because he was tragically impatient with regard to everything except sex. 

“How was the North,” said Sirius. 

“Fine. Cold. The pack was all women, mostly, and kids. They want to help us.” 

“Wow — really?” His expression was so electric and surprised something about it seemed to chafe. Remus supposed his face must’ve done something involuntarily because Sirius went on. “It’s just that — well how many packs and covens and bands and the like have you visited. Six?” 

“Seven,” said Remus. “They distrust — ” 

“I know they distrust the Ministry. And with good reason. But you don’t work for the Ministry.” 

“It’s all the same to them. And anyway it doesn’t matter because these — they made me breakfast. Their chieftainess and I wrote to Dumbledore. They said they’d help us however they can.” 

Sirius smiled a little from across the table. “Good news,” he said. “Good on you, Moony.” 

Two months previous Sirius had sat at Remus’s bedside in St. Mungo’s as he recovered from the injuries he had sustained when he had neglected due to his own misinformation to bow properly to a Grindylow coven leader. He had managed to fight himself free before he had been drowned in some distant moor bog in which it seemed likely his body would have been mummified or something else disgusting and horrible and discovered after millennia remarkably preserved in the weight of the peat, but there were vivid weals up and down his arms to his shoulders and around his ankles and even his neck where they had grasped him and pulled. At his left wrist the ribbonlike grasp had cut almost to the bone and he still wore a bandage; the healing scar looked like a mark left by silver handcuffs. Since then Sirius had regarded most of Remus’s liaison as dangerous work behind enemy lines and he had communicated as such to Dumbledore to no avail. Remus was not certain whether to feel touched by his concern or affronted that Sirius doubted his capability. Or confused and vaguely hurt by the fact that Sirius thought he was in danger from beings who after all were not so very far from himself. Or truly hurt, and disappointed and almost frightened, that in fact he was, more often than not. 

He lay awake sometimes in the night beside Sirius listening to his soft snoring and to the sounds from the street and to his own heartbeat thinking about every stupid thing that Sirius had ever said or done to hurt him and how he had not understood it was hurtful sometimes until weeks later. Inasmuch as everyone had a difficult time unlearning it seemed for Sirius it was nigh on impossible. There was some deep and unpurgeable place in him, Remus knew (and he was holding Sirius in his arms, and Sirius had just been inside him, and he knew like as much as he knew the laws of elemental transfiguration that Sirius loved him, but still he knew), which had not entirely forgotten that in the locked glass case in the Black library Sirius’s parents had kept a werewolf’s left front paw, preserved and entirely intact but for where the claws had been pulled out long ago and ground up for use in Dark potions. 

“What are you reading,” Remus asked, to get his mind off it, because Sirius had picked up the paper again. 

From behind the _Prophet_ Sirius’s mouth was full of toast. “Merfolk uprising on the Danish coast,” he said, muffledly. “Emboldened by the recent actions of Greyback and Peel, posits the _Prophet_.” Robin Peel was the headman of the only known British vampire cult to have openly aligned with Voldemort. “Twelve Muggles and two MLE responders have been drowned. They’ve appealed to the British Ministry for aid but of course none’s forthcoming.” 

“Is that so.” 

“Gruesome stuff,” said Sirius with something like a badly masked delight. “They’ve thrown the victims’ heads onto the beach…” 

Do you mean to do this to me, Remus almost said. Instead he said, “I’m going to go back to bed.” 

Sirius folded the paper. “Of course. You alright?” 

“I feel like shit.” 

Sirius walked him into the bedroom and folded the sheets down and Remus took his jeans off and coiled his belt and listened while Sirius cast spells he often did after the full moon, spells for soft and sound and dreamless sleep, spells for calmness and spells for clarity. Then he pulled the shades tightly and he kissed Remus goodnight again, very gently on the lips and cheek and forehead, though by the clock on the dresser it was just past noon. Then he went back into the kitchen to finish the paper, and Remus got in bed and watched the pale daylight move upon the floor. He thought about the taxidermy of himself he knew was preserved somewhere far in the back of Sirius’s mind, but when he fell asleep he dreamed about a field of wildflowers. 


	6. things you said after it was over

He intended to go to the funeral but spent much of that day instead in bed hungover smoking joints and staring not so much through the window but just in its general direction. His only suit, which his parents had bought for him, June 1978, just after Hogwarts graduation, for him to wear to the single job interview he had secured at the _Prophet_ and from which of course subsequently he had been denied, was hanging in the bathroom on the shower curtain rod; it was wrinkled and shapeless and smelled like mothballs, because it had been wedged in the back of the closet behind even the teal velvet dress robes James had found in a trunk in his parents’ attic and given to Sirius as a joke. 

He lay in bed and looked at the window and thought about everything in the closet he would burn. About everything on the bookshelf he would burn and everything in the milk crate of records he would smash to pieces, when he could manage to get out of bed long enough to do it. And he thought as the pale wedge of burgeoning moon appeared in a corner of the sky about the fact that in eight days he would be obliged to go somewhere and become a wolf. The grief made him feel like fucking, as grief did, and had before, and the rest of it made him never want to fuck again. He remembered the month after his father had died, April 1980, and he got up and went to the toilet to puke but could not. The fist around his stomach was tight and cold as stone. 

At dusk he went into the kitchen and made toast and put on the record which was on the turntable. It was Patti Smith’s _Horses_ and probably five or six days previous he had turned it off at the beginning of “Land.” 

— _when Suddenly Johnny he gets a feeling he’s been surrounded by Horses Horses Horses Horses coming in all directions White Shining Silver Studs with their nose in flames_ — 

Sirius had not after all lived with him with any sort of reliability for months since his suspicion became clear. Or at least since the performance of it had all wound down to the final act. Like this whole thing was a lost piece of _Tosca_. Remus had been wondering now when he could focus enough on it exactly how long he had been rehearsing. How long he himself had been an unwitting partner in the sort of dance — the dance, which they were doing together in the bleary grease-golden light above the stove; _there is no Land but the Land_ , Patti sang, _there is no Sea but the Sea, there is no Keeper but the Key_ … they were very deeply stoned or otherwise at least one of them was tripping fuck so it had certainly been when Gideon was still alive, because he had long provided them with acid. Sirius was holding his face like in him was some crystal ball. The smooth inside of a teacup imprinted with incomprehensible symbology — which at the time perhaps he had been. He understood now that Sirius had been looking through him (he was always picturing Millet’s “The Gleaners”) for whatever he had which could be forfeited. Which could be pulled out through his mouth hand over hand like an endless psychedelic handkerchief belonging to a magician. He had handed over this and this and all this with a mindless will he believed at the time to be brave. He would have given Sirius a kidney if he had asked. 

The toaster dinged and Remus found the toast black enough for his liking and spread it with butter and a bit of blackberry jam. He ate at the kitchen table and when the song was over he started it over again with a spell he performed wandlessly because he was not sure where his wand was. He had not touched it now since Halloween. 

_O pretty boy,_ said Patti. _Can’t you show me nothing but surrender?_

After a little while he got up and went back into the bedroom and dug through the scattered things on the floor for one of the notebooks he had abandoned upon giving up attempting to make enough for his end of the rent via writing freelance reviews of noise tapes and trashy novels, and he flipped to the back pages, because he knew somewhere in the front he and Sirius had been playing Exquisite Corpse — 

(Exquisite, he thought, exquisite, exquisite corpses — ) 

— and he found one of his old quills, fairly crushed, and a bottle of ink in the bedside table drawer, beside a sticky bottle of novelty lube Sirius had purchased in ’79 in attempt to win him over with sex after some bullshit fight (they hadn’t known, in ’79, the meaning of a word like _fight_ ) and a National Geographic and a baggie with powdered-sugar dregs of coke still in it, and then he slammed the drawer shut and he went and sat down at the kitchen table again with his cold toast and wrote a letter. 

_FUCK YOU_

_A few days ago I was wishing you would be executed because your death would lift every spell you put on me. But I suppose it will not be very long until you go mad and I am told madness can serve a similar purpose depending on what kind of madness. I have written to ask you politely to lift whatever enchantments I am under as a kind of gesture of goodwill towards me as the person who made literally two billion allowances for you in all your fucking bullshit since literally the very day we met, and who allowed you to practice on my person any number of weird sex things, and who told you every last one of my most precious and horrible secrets some of which you successfully used to destroy me but many of which you apparently gathered for my utter humiliation only. I don’t know why you did it, but I’m trying to remind myself it doesn’t matter why you did it, or how long you had been doing it, because whatever the answer is it doesn't matter as you still did it._

_You have no soul — I am certain. I feel like I’m one of your Horcruxes. I want to cut my whole inside out and yet I know you will not be as miserable as I will be for the rest of my entire fucking life unless I make you so miserable and so I will. I hope you never sleep again. I am going to scale the wall of that place and destroy you. I am going to learn oneiromancy and literally haunt your fucking dreams._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Remus J. Lupin_

When he had finished he went to the record player and put on the Stooges’ _Funhouse_ , and he found half a joint in the ashtray by the stove and lit it, and folded the letter and scrawled on the front of it the name and address: 

_Sirius Judas Cassius Brutus Guy Fawkes Benedict Arnold Black  
_ _Azkaban  
_ _the North Sea_

Then he went into the bedroom and found his sweater on the floor and put it on and climbed the fire escape to the roof in the coming night wind. There were carrier pigeons in a hastily erected cage up there huddling together for warmth — of late they had used them for communication within the Order, as they were more surreptitious — and Remus reached in and grasped one like a snake and bound the letter to its skinny twitchy leg. 

He sent it off, and then he sat and watched it disappear until he could see it no more in the darkness. Down on the street someone was laughing. He put the joint out on the old brick, and then he went inside. There was much remaining to burn. 


	7. things you said while i was crying

In May 1982 Remus scraped his Gringotts’ vault fully empty and went to a Wizarding outdoor store in Diagon Alley, where he bought a backpack and a tent and some prepackaged meals. Then he went back to Gringotts and changed all the money to Canadian dollars but for about seventy pounds, which he took to Heathrow the next day, after he had packed up everything he could stand to touch in the flat and shoved it into the backpack, and with which he purchased a one-way plane ticket to Montreal. 

When he arrived at the hostel he’d called from the airport in the early hours of the morning there was a letter for him behind the desk from Dumbledore. 

_Remus my dear, I understand your desire to leave London but this is not something you can truly run from. I think you will find that it lives most of all inside your own head._

_I have enclosed enough in Canadian dollars for a return flight to Heathrow. When you return to London I can say with certainty I can offer you a job. There is currently a vacancy in groundskeeping at the historical Winterbottom estate in Melksham and I know for a fact they promote from within. The underkeeper is a close personal friend of mine and a housing subsidy would be included in your wages._

_Please contact me upon receipt. I look forward to seeing you again in London as soon as possible. — AD_

Remus pocketed the colorful cash — $120 Canadian — and crumpled the letter in a fist. To the girl behind the counter he tried his intolerable French — “Ou est le station de bus?” 

“Down the street,” she said, in heavily accented English. She was absently filing her nails with an emory board, and she had been smoking a joint whose ember rested in the porcelain ashtray by the hostel’s datebook. “Just around the corner on Rue Sanguinet.” 

“Can I get a bus like — to the West?” 

“Oui,” she said, “yes, in Canada, Greyhound goes everywhere.” 

As such Remus went around the corner to the bus station on Rue Sanguinet and bought a $30 Greyhound ticket to Winnipeg. The clerk told him, struggling with English, that the trip would take two days and left at 6am. He tried to fall asleep in one of the plastic chairs leaning on his backpack but could not so he read the book he had brought with him, which was Forster’s _Room with a View_. Quickly he found himself too tired to focus on it so he dug out from his backpack his walkman and his tape of Scars’ _Author! Author!_ and listened, absently people-watching at the scant other passengers. Buses came in from points East and West all through the night carrying tired-looking Canadians and travelers speaking multitudes of languages and carrying heavy backpacks and some of them were dressed in business clothes and carried suitcases and he wondered if any of them were wizards. He didn’t know much about the state of Canadian magical education except all the horrible stuff everyone knew. 

At around 5am just before the bus boarded he went into the washroom and splashed his face and brushed his teeth, and in one of the stalls he burnt with magic the letter Dumbledore had sent. In the mirror with his big backpack on he looked altogether burned to scorched earth by civilization and utterly determined to leave it. Both of which he supposed were true. It was very English of him, he decided, to be destroyed, or to be fallen, like an empire, and to be reading Forster in a Quebecois bus station at four in the morning listening to very damaged post-punk, and to have kept shaving his face despite everything, and cutting his hair, and trying to look and behave like a person, and grieving in an altogether very stupid way he knew looked more like willful self-destruction to most other people. 

\--

He woke up on a highway through the woods, and by the light it was just past noon, and the road signs were predominately in English, which meant they had crossed into the province of Ontario. He had put a tape on when they had boarded the bus and let it come to the end of the side so the static white noise would blur the road sounds, but it was the light that had awoken him. 

In his pack he had water and some trail mix which he ate and then he fell asleep again. He woke up in the late evening in Sudbury when they were obliged to switch buses to continue West to Sault-Ste-Marie. On the way they would pass through Ojibwe land which could only be set foot upon with written permission from the tribe. He had never seen something of the sort and in the gathering night he tried to read the big yellow signs but could not. The road the bus took was the largest national highway and yet it constituted one lane in each direction and some of the towns they went through were a general store and gas station surrounded by a cluster of trailers and little else. In some of these towns the driver stopped and climbed out to meet one of the shop proprietors and deliver a package from the trailer the bus towed. 

They stopped at a rest area for coffee and bathrooms and Remus had a cigarette and talked a little with a young American woman, from Albuquerque, she said, who was also fleeing something; she did not say it aloud, but he could tell it in her eyes. She did tell him she was going to Yellowknife. 

\--

He woke again on the high shores above Lake Superior at dawn. The woman from Albuquerque had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder. She had bound her eyes in a scarf against the coming sun. 

The light was a pale pink-white beset with orange and grey, and the road was narrow, and the bus was the only thing on it, except the birds. Just beneath them the shadow-black cliff fell away into the spreading water which went as far as he could see and across it was another nation. The soft light cast it in color like a piece of dropped fabric. 

He had never been on a road before that seemed so like something rolled out by magic across the naked ancient land. Evidence of some stupid and impermanent interlocution. He rewound his Doors tape and listened while the sun came up. When the woman from Albuquerque woke in an hour or so she disentangled her face and hair from the scarf and together they watched out the window unspeaking. 

\--

In Winnipeg the next evening he was obliged to find some form of Wizarding establishment as the full moon was in four days and he had begun to become nervous about where he would transform. The woods out in Manitoba and Western Ontario were thick and dark and beset with a cold fog, and it felt rather like the Forbidden Forest except there was a different sort of magic to it, but the people he talked to on the bus had said there were fishing camps everywhere upon the multiplicity of lakes welled up into the slate shield. 

The Wizarding Office of Manitoba was not far from the art college and the tiny students’ neighborhood where Remus had a cheap breakfast at a small diner that was filled with light. In the office he gathered his passport and his papers from his backpack and waited in an uncomfortable chair. He could not stop bouncing one foot and he wanted desperately a cigarette as he usually did when he was obliged to communicate the fact of his werewolfness to some other party. 

At last a witch came to fetch him and they went to her office. Her name was Dr. Rhonda Keller and she was the Manitoban Undersecretary of Beast and Being Affairs. She traded Remus’s papers for her own business card, which bore the seals of the Canadian wizarding congress, the province of Manitoba, and the national Beast and Being office, which pictured a wolf howling at the moon set against a rough outline of Canada. 

“This is all in order,” said Dr. Keller, passing his papers back. She smiled in a friendly way showing crooked and tea-stained teeth. “They certainly are thorough at your Werewolf Registry over in the U.K.” 

She gave him a map of the prairie provinces illustrating the locations of supervised werewolf transformation cells. It was a complex piece of magic that could be zoomed in on to show exact addresses, hours, and phone numbers. “If you want to go up North that’s alright,” said Dr. Keller, “but most of those cells are run by tribal governments so I’ll have to get you special paperwork. Which is fine but it just might take a couple hours. I will say that the one in Saskatoon is brand new and very nice.” 

Remus very much doubted it was very nice but he said that would do and shook Dr. Keller’s hand and went out. He took the city buses back out to the airport where the Greyhound station was, and he bought a ticket to Saskatoon departing that evening at 7:30pm, and then he sat outside on the curb and read _Room with a View._

\--

There were supervised transformation cells in London, run by the Ministry, at which he had been obliged to spend full moons for much of 1981. James was too busy and too hunted, Sirius was too busy and too secretive (which did not strike him at the time as suspicious, because it struck him at the time as his own fault), and Peter was too busy and too scared and anyway useless on his own, so Remus didn't say anything to anybody at all and every full moon afternoon around 3pm he Apparated to the facility and had tea and coffee with the scant handful of werewolves (fewer every time) who had not joined packs, and who either trusted the Ministry or had no other options. The oldest among them was about forty-five but moved and acted as though she were seventy, and the youngest looked about fifteen. There was a kind of atrium where they could sit and wait and talk, though they did not talk, and there were always graduate students sitting at foldout tables with biscuits or cubes of fancy cheese looking for subjects for potions trials or other sorts of experiments ( _with 100 galleon stipend!_ ) and looking vaguely terrified, and then there were the cells, which were bare and whitewashed, with thick concrete doors. It had always struck Remus like solitary confinement at a mental institution in a horror film minus only the chains. There was a high cubby where you could put your clothes or anything you had brought with you and otherwise the room was featureless. The only light was magical and floating in the ceiling and he always suspected they turned it off once the moon rose. Anyway there were only like twenty minutes in the room he had to remember, just before and just after, and he hardly remembered that time anyway, but he was thinking, this is where I belong, this is where I deserve to be. From here I cannot hurt anyone except myself. 

Then he would Apparate home in the morning, and sometimes Sirius would be there and sometimes not, and he would ease all his aching bones into the bed, and pass out. Sometimes he would wake up and Sirius would be touching his face and his hair but then he saw Remus’s eyes open and his face turned steely again and then he left the room. He lay in the bed feeling how clear-cut forests felt. How a fallow field felt, he thought, like, mined of all the riches and the goodness, stripped even of skin, naked, naked, blood and bone — 

Maybe if you hadn’t hated yourself so much you would’ve seen this for what it was, he sometimes thought. Maybe if you hadn’t chalked everything up to be your fault you would’ve noticed what was not as it should be. But he also sometimes thought, the fact that you ever believed for one moment, let alone for four or five years, that someone truly loved you, that they wanted you (that he wanted you, that someone like him wanted you) as anything more than a means to an end, more than a sort of titillatingly dangerous and fuckable novelty, more than a symbol for something tamed and conquered and declawed and silenced, is indicative of your own willful fucking ignorance. Your own continual stubborn refusal to swallow what you got fed on the full moon night moor when you were five years old. 

\--

The woman from Albuquerque was at the transformation cells in Saskatoon with a coffee and a cigarette. The place looked rather like a bus station, except it was in a basement, with tiny windows set high up in the walls letting in pale shreds of light, and it was cold. It was three in the afternoon on the full moon day and already there were fifteen or so werewolves there which was of no matter, said the clerk, because there were seventy cells. 

“There are fifty registered werewolves in the Saskatoon metropolitan area,” explained the clerk. Remus, who had come in on the bus from Winnipeg a few days previous in the very early morning, strongly doubted the surrounding region qualified as a metropolitan area. “There are a couple in the surrounding country but they usually make independent provisions. The rest are reserved for guests. We do have a Saskatchewan Lycanthropic Council,” he said proudly, “which meets here for a sort of summit once a year.” 

“That’s very — we don’t have that sort of thing in the U.K.” 

“You’ll find, Mr. Lupin,” said the clerk with a spreading smile, “things are a’ok for werewolves in Canada!” 

Things were a’ok, perhaps, for caucasian werewolves in Canada, but this was unsaid. After a quick tour of the cells (he was allotted number 51) Remus went back out into the atrium and found the woman from Albuquerque, who was reading a copy of _Vogue_ magazine, and who had co-opted a teacup as an ashtray; it was nearly overflowing. “Not surprised,” she said, when he took off his heavy backpack and settled into the uncomfortable plastic chair beside her. 

“Nor am I, really.” 

She studied him, his face and hands, which were in his lap, and one of which was vaguely trembling. He wondered where and when and how old she had been when she had been bitten. “How long do you think you’re going to travel for?” she asked. And he remembered, a few days previous, when they had spoken at the rest stop, she had asked him, what are you doing here in Canada, and he had said, traveling. Because there was nothing else to say. Hiding, perhaps. Dodging. Crawling into the earth and lying down and falling asleep. 

“I don’t know,” Remus said. “You know this is the second largest country in the world. And besides after I think I might go to America.” 

“Harder to be a werewolf in America,” she said. “There’s nothing there like this. You have to lock yourself in a basement. There are some churches and hostels — I’ll make you a list of ones I know. They have a kind of concrete cell right beside where they have like, clean needles for heroin addicts.” 

“At school I had — like a haunted house.” 

“We had a cave,” she said, but she smiled. “With bats.” 

She bummed him a cigarette, and they drank tea, and the atrium filled up and people were embracing and talking and laughing all around, and the clerk was bustling about getting the new arrivals to sign in, and Remus and the woman from Albuquerque talked around the white elephant between them which was that it was very obvious they were both running. He eventually became convinced she had killed or at the very least turned someone, and he could not be certain if it had been accidental or on purpose. She would not look him in the eye for very long, and she kept glancing toward all the doors and windows, and she was nervously picking at her fingernails which were bitten short and bloody about the beds. Sirius had always done that in some extremity or another and his hands had also been artistic the way hers were and narrow and they moved quickly and there was always magic in them like just beyond the skin — 

A bell rang eventually indicating there were twenty minutes left until moonrise and as such they all started off down the hallway toward the cells, and Remus went into #51 and locked the door and warded it with all the text from the placard of spells upon the wall, then he put his backpack and his wand and shoes in the cubby and undressed, then he sat in the corner with his back pressed up into the wall forehead to knees in a kind of meditative fetal position the way he had since he was a child. Like a sketch of the position one should take in the event of nuclear holocaust. Carefully he folded his hands over the back of his neck. In the space behind his eyes was a soft pure darkness and he could feel though he could not see the moon pulling up from beneath the far-off vivid prairie horizon like some midnight visitant upon the threshold. 

This was the furthest from home he had ever been, he realized; this was the other side of the very world, and on the other side he had tried to leave everything he had done wrong, but it had followed him. 

He understood some shred of it would follow him always and on the edge of himself like that he almost did not mind it. The pain had started to creep up on him tugging and stretching and he could hear his own breath howling in him like a blacksmith’s bellows and his traitorous fucking heartbeat in his ears and he recalled, so help him, with a wash of pure and sacred relief, he lay in their bed in their Camden flat feigning sleep and Sirius was beside him smelling like Earl Grey and pot and sweat and his teeth were unbrushed, and his hand wrapped Remus’s bare shoulder as if to communicate some spell, and then he pressed forward and stroked Remus’s hair behind his ear. The kiss pressed to his jaw. Softly the hand which wrapped the panel of his ribs ripped years previous to bloody shreds and topographic with scars — evidence he was possessed first and foremost by another. Evidence, evidence, evidence. 

\--

In the morning when he had stretched out of it again he dressed quickly as soon as he could stand to get up, and he put his boots and backpack back on, aching with their weight, and he went out of the cell and into the washroom where he cleaned his face and brushed his teeth, and he made a cup of coffee and climbed the stairs out again into the pale day. He did not think he could face the sight of all the Canadian werewolves chatting jovially and he knew he would run into the woman from Albuquerque again. 

There was a magic shop in Saskatoon in a district called Westmount and it took him only about an hour’s navigating with his wand and rudimentary scrying skill to find it. It was the sort of magic shop run by a single eccentric elderly woman with dreadlocks who burned patchouli candles. Indeed when the bell above the door rung gently as he went in he watched the woman at the counter quickly hide whatever she had been smoking. 

“Morning dearie,” she said. “Looking for something? We just got a brand new shipment of frogs’ eyes…” 

“I need like, a bit of dittany,” he said. The wolf hadn’t been too unkind to his body in the night but there was a long sharp gash high on his side he had pressed a few paper towels against. “And if you have them — jars like the sort you can use as a Pensieve.” 

“Certainly, we have those,” she said. “Hand blown by a local artisan.” 

“For — sorry, for how much?” 

“Twenty dollars. The dittany would be thirty for six fluid ounces.” 

Remaining to his name Remus had $142.85 Canadian dollars. He agreed to the prices and the lady went to the back to bottle the dittany and fetch one of the Pensieve jars, which were a pretty pale-pink cloudy Depression glass, like a jelly plate upon which a ‘50s housewife might serve an aspic. She showed Remus the spell to cap it, and then she wrapped it up in tissue paper against shattering in his backpack. 

“Once you have memories in it,” she said, “you shouldn’t need to wrap it anymore. It’s a wonderful bit of magic — the physical form of it is strengthened by what’s inside it. Your memories become almost part of the glass. But until you’ve filled it perhaps up to here — ” she indicated about a third of the way — “you should treat it as very fragile.” 

He paid and thanked her and packed up the things in the backpack’s several vestigial pockets, and then he walked to the bus station, where he looked at a map for about twenty minutes and at last bought a ticket to Jasper, Alberta. 

\--

He had been thinking about this for a long time. Sometimes it felt like he could not move under the weight of the memories. They were like a heavy smothering blanket except they felt very cold. And sometimes remembering them gave him comfort that scared him — as it had the night before. As it had every full moon night now since it had happened and most other nights to boot — he would wake from dreaming and reach for the other warmth in the bed. But there was none, and the warmth he recalled had revealed itself to be false. 

Every night he dreamed they were in bed together or they were walking together in the woods or on the beach and he had dared to hold Sirius’s hand or his arm between the elbow and shoulder or otherwise he had nightmares they were at war together and he watched every death he had not seen, Marlene and Dorcas and the Prewitts and Dearborn and even Regulus, and when the smoke cleared he could not see the faces across the battlefield, but neither could he find Sirius. After a while it became clear he alone had survived, and then the dream stretched out, like a road across the moor disappearing into fog, and he walked for a while in the darkness, and then he woke up. 

When he was awake it was similar. He thought perhaps his memory was broken, like he had incurred some terrible injury to it, or else he was under some spell or several, but he had undertaken to have those lifted (he had showed up on Kingsley Shacklebolt’s doorstep wasted), and he had been told he was under no enchantment at all by several experts on the subject from St. Mungo’s. 

The only solution was to remove them all like a sort of surgery. It was better than requesting a lobotomy. He had not considered suicide since early in November though he had considered heroin, but he disliked needles. 

Perhaps if they were all gone there would be room for something more. If they were all gone he could look through the bus window at the shifting green world and the mountains and he could see it and know what it meant. He could make decisions unencumbered by it all, and he could see without the distorting lens of it, and he could stop thinking, at every minute, on an endless screaming klaxon ringing like hell’s tinnitus, WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY — 

\--

He arrived in Jasper at 6am. The sun had not fully set all the night so he had watched as the bus gained altitude and the trees thinned and the stars blinked out very pale for just a moment in the charcoal-grey sky then disappeared again. 

From the bus station he went to the national park tourist information office and sat on the curb outside with a coffee and a pastry until a ranger arrived at 8am. He went inside and looked at all the maps for a while before he went up to the ranger’s desk and asked her, “What’s the nearest backpacking trail I could do from town?” 

The ranger looked at Remus’s pack and his boots and his face which was no doubt horrific with exhaustion. “Well, that depends,” she said. “How long are you prepared to hike?” 

“As long as possible.” 

It seemed this was not the right answer but the ranger produced, seemingly reluctantly, a map from under her desk. “There’s this,” she said, indicating a pale red line through the high mountains. “It’s a traverse of the Maligne Range. It’s almost 45 kilometers. There’s been a great deal of bear activity up there this summer and the temperatures fluctuate — ” 

“Sounds great,” Remus said. “Where’s the trailhead?” 

\--

He went back out to the highway and hitchhiked East a few miles to the trailhead and then he shouldered the backpack and started off. The woods were thick and cool and there was snow in the dark patches and very quickly the trail started heading up switchbacks and he was obliged to cast a few lightening spells on his backpack. Clouds gathered that concealed the sun and then they blew over again. By two in the afternoon he had come above the treeline, and the steepness of the slope began to even out. He stopped to fill his canteen at a stream and purified the water with a handy spell straight out of his parents’ old copy of _The Backwoods Wizard_ , and he had a quick snack of trail mix and elk jerky he’d bought in town, and then he moved on again. 

It was so high there was no breath in the air and his mind felt lighter. The mountains beyond seemed close enough almost to touch and he watched the fog and cloud shift around them like a strange dance. For about twenty minutes it flurried snow, and then the clouds shifted. The color of the high tundra — the grasses and the flowers, _lupines_ , he noted, touching the high stalks — was kaleidoscopic and unfamiliar. Once he stood stock-still and watched as a grizzly sow and two cubs crossed his path a hundred yards onward. They had been rooting for bulbs and their paws and snouts were muddy. 

At around seven in the evening it was still bright as day but he stopped and set up his tent and built a fire and heated one of the prepared meals he’d brought from London. He had a cigarette and put on one of his warmest sweaters, and then he unwrapped very carefully the pink glass jar from his backpack and set it before him. When he touched the glass it felt warm, and almost waiting. 

The clouds and the fog moved in the valley and in the soft wind the small purple flowers shifted like bells. He could taste in the air that it would snow in the night. He wanted another cigarette, but he had to conserve the rest, because he would be in the mountains for many days. Perhaps it was best to enact this like ripping off a bandaid. He lifted his wand to his temple — 

_It was August, or maybe September; they had fought, and Sirius had stormed out, and Remus had laid down in the bed and watched the sunset in the window, and the pillow smelled like Sirius’s hair, and at the time he thought this was the worst he would ever feel. He could not recall even what he had said and he understood it did not matter. Downstairs from the butchers’ shop he could smell blood. He remembered his conviction that if he locked himself up in one of the supervised transformation cells every night perhaps he would never hurt anyone at all._

_He must have fallen asleep because then he heard the door open and outside the window it was very dark. His heart felt like — too many metaphors. Like a rotting fruit — like a tight fist — like a cold stone. Sick. He was always sick — he was only sick — and to stand beside him was catching, and the sickness was Darkness. This he knew, by now, after sixteen years with it._

_Sirius sat on the edge of the bed and took his boots off and Remus heard his belt coil upon the floor and then he lay down and reached for Remus’s shoulder and clasped it tightly and Remus started crying. He had not cried about it before and would not again. It was like some sudden thunderous burst like a dam breaking… “Oh, hell,” Sirius said, and he pressed closer, “oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Moony, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”_

_He also did not remember what Sirius had said when they had fought. Certainly it was something pretty horrible and certainly he himself had said something just as horrible. They were really fucking good at this, he wanted to say; they were better at hurting each other than the Death Eaters were._

_“I can’t manage this,” Sirius said, “much longer. It’s driving me out of my mind.”_

_So help him Remus was certain at first he was talking about them._

_“What is — you know I feel like I finally get that Wilfred Owen poem these days.”_

_He laughed a kind of sob noise. Sirius had wrapped an arm around his torso and pressed it up against Remus’s far shoulder and Remus could feel his heartbeat echoing through himself._

_“God I’m sorry,” said Sirius again. “I’m sorry, I don't know why I keep doing this, doing this to you.”_

_But he did know, and he would not say. There was a part of his love that was missing. Sometimes it felt like nothing in the face of the pure golden light-bath of it and other times it felt like a black hole stretching out and out drowning every single thing it touched._

_“I love you so much,” Sirius said, into his shoulder, “I’m trying —_ ” 

He took a wild heaving sobbing breath in and saw it hanging like a strand of silver from the end of his wand. His face was wet with tears the breeze had cooled and he was shaking and sometime in the course of it the fire had gone out. Far off in the valley the fog had moved to conceal the closest bank of mountains entire. 

It felt exorcised. When he tried to touch the raw place in his memory it had come from he felt the shape of it — a kind of cauterized lack. Yet he could not bring himself to put it in the jar. So he touched his wand again to his temple thinking he would replace it with another — 

_Sirius had come in the door covered in blood so Remus had taken him to the bathroom and put him in the shower in all his clothes and had sat with him while it eddied in the drain. At first Sirius hadn't spoken at all and then he had started weeping and then at last he had calmed down enough to talk though he had not entirely stopped crying._

_“They were in the — well it was an ambush. In the churchyard in Nottingham. We were supposed to meet someone for information but — Mary’s dead. And Fenwick.”_

_He squeezed Sirius’s hand tightly like to draw out the poison of it and also to keep from screaming._

_“I don’t think this blood is real. I hope it isn’t real. They have — they’ve come up with so much magic just to torture us.” He swallowed a sound, like he was going to tell Remus about more of it but couldn’t bear. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”_

_“Sure,” he said, “sure, okay.” He reached forward and they embraced. Sirius’s wet hands clasped in fists in the back of his shirt. “I love you,” he said. Sometimes he just said it when he didn’t know what else to say. He knew in this context it was a clever code for, I am very glad you are still alive, and you must not leave me. Code for: you are very strong and brave, and you must not leave me._

_“I love, I love you too,” said Sirius, into his throat, which was code for, I need you to keep me standing up, and I need you to remind me what the difference is between me and them._

_Remus climbed in the bathtub with all his clothes on and they kissed; it tasted like salt, because Sirius could not stop crying. It seemed like a sensical reaction to grief, he thought, as Sirius pushed his shirt up, touched the very old scar, and the less old ones, settled his hands (where they belonged) on Remus’s hips, pressing his thumbs into the vivid blue veins — when faced with death, ceaseless death, unending death, living death, fleeing from death, one was obliged to desperately prove one’s life whenever one could seize the opportunity._

_“I can’t,” said Sirius, “I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear, to be without you.”_

_“You don’t mean that.”_

_“Yes, God, yes I do. I do.”_

_The shower beat a kind of rhythmic tattoo on his shoulders and Sirius’s hand was pressed to the small of his back. He didn’t say anything, as though it wasn’t true just the same for him —_

This time it hurt somewhat less when he had pulled it completely free. But it was snowing now, heavily, and his fingers and toes were numb. In the dusky light the memories at the end of his wand seemed to glow. In his frozen hand it felt like a club. 

He sat up with difficulty and brushed the snowflakes that had accumulated from his sweater and jeans, and he gathered up his things and went in the tent. He warmed himself with a few spells and a cup of hot chocolate prepared on the tent’s passable hotplate, and when he could feel his fingers again he pressed the silvery point of his wand against his temple and willed the memories back inside. Then he picked up the jar and the lid of it and unzipped the opening in the tent and threw the glass into the snow. 

\--

At around eight in the morning he woke and made a cup of coffee and then he broke camp. In the night it had snowed perhaps two inches but already much of it had melted or blown from the path he would follow Northward across the high traverse. He vanished the embers and ashes of his fire, and then he had a cigarette and some trail mix and headed out. 

The Pensieve jar had broken against a boulder at the edge of his camp. Against the pristine paleness of the snow the pinkness of the glass looked almost like very old blood. Guiltily he vanished the shards as well. Then he walked on again. 


	8. things you said with no space between us

Remus’s parents cottage, in which he had grown up from age six or so until he had left for Hogwarts, was in a dell on the moor not far from Cranford Chase like a kind of fairytale house or the domain of an eccentric recluse. The cottage had been in Remus’s mother’s family for decades and the Lupins had often summered there until a few months after Remus was bitten, when they were obliged to leave the house where they lived outside Yeovil, because the neighbors were asking questions about the howls. The cottage had a stone and clay basement which Remus’s parents quickly fortified with assorted magical reinforcements. As such after his tendering of his resignation from Hogwarts he had returned there to lick his metaphorical wounds, and to stare out the window, and to chain-smoke cigarettes, which was what he was doing when Sirius arrived, as a dog, early in the summer of 1995. 

It was dusk. When he saw Sirius he stood, and he looked very narrow, like he would turn and disappear. The pale golden light from inside streamed around him like some supernova burst and so did the music he was listening to, and the smell of something baking. He pet the dog’s head and scratched behind the ears, and they went inside. Sirius sat politely while Remus unfolded the sofa bed. He was having trouble deciding when he should put the human skin back on, but Remus didn’t say anything about it. He went into the other room and came back with some pillows and some blankets. 

“There’s currant scones,” he said, “in the morning. There’s currants out back.” 

Unsaid: will you stay? 

\--

Sirius had written one letter to Remus from a beach town in the Azores called Ajuga de Bretanha. He had spent much of the time he lived there in his tiny rented room lying in the tiny bed as a dog watching the light move upon the tile floor hypnotized by the deep spreading sky, blue as a vein, and the warmth, and the smell of the breeze, like sun and sand. He wrote to Harry and had the letters delivered by assorted colorful birds which delighted him. But the letter he sent to Remus he sent by pigeon. 

_I have gone to the record store and purchased London Calling, Station to Station, and Here Come the Warm Jets_ , he wrote. He had chosen those records because he recognized the covers of them. When he had put them on the turntable in his tiny room, struggling to remember how to operate it, he found he could not listen to any of them very long. The memory — the absence of memory — was a kind of oppressive weight. When he listened to “Golden Years” he found suddenly he was weeping but could not recall for the life of him exactly why. _I do not have much to do so if you have any other music recommendations like things I might have missed or whatnot I would appreciate it. Also books would be helpful (magic and otherwise). But I understand if you do not want to hear from or speak to me. I am truly dreadfully sorry for everything and I hope — I am trying very hard to come back to Merrie Olde Englande and I hope you will see me. And I hope you are well, S.B._

Remus wrote back in two weeks’ time. His handwriting, never good, had become a great deal worse in the very long interim. 

_Records:_

_Slint — Spiderland  
_ _Talking Heads — Speaking in Tongues  
_ _Jesus and Mary Chain — Psychocandy  
_ _The Breeders — Last Splash  
_ _The Clean — Vehicle  
_ _Anything you can find by Kate Bush_

_As for books I think the only Muggle novel I’ve read in a while that I liked a lot was Geek Love by Katharine Dunn. In terms of magic books there’s Lycanthropic History of North America by Clio Harpy-Ross, and Desert Golgotha by Lourdes Rodriguez, which is a kind of radioactive cryptid history of the American Southwest; I was her research assistant, for a while, in New Mexico._

_That should keep you occupied for awhile._

_Do let me know when you are coming back. I am at my parents’ place. — RJL_

Sirius went to the record store and bought all the records listed, then he went to an English bookstore where he bought _Geek Love_ , and then he went to the magic bookshop where he was obliged to order both books, as neither were in stock. He read the Muggle novel and listened to _Spiderland_ and wept at the end of the last song when the singer yelled, _I miss you_. He wrote several letters to Remus after that, which he did not send. 

\--

He woke up in the morning and Remus was at the kitchen sink watching out the window. The water was running, but he was doing nothing with it. He had arranged the currant scones handsomely upon a chipped blue willow china plate, and he was boiling water for tea. 

Sirius had put his human skin back on just before he fell asleep. The skin he had now was a skin Remus had never seen. It was a skin carven upon gesturally with ink in the manner of prehistoric cave paintings. When he had first beheld it after his escape his reflection had shocked him. It looked like a map of hell but then he supposed so Remus’s skin did, or it had, when he dreamed of it. 

The kettle boiled and Sirius got up and tied his hair up and put on the heavy sweater Remus had left next to his bed, and then he went in the kitchen and grabbed three currant scones. “I forget if you take sugar,” said Remus. 

“Just a bit.” 

They went out on the stoop together and ate and Remus gave him a cigarette. “I read all the books you recommended,” Sirius told him. 

“What did you think?” 

What he truly thought was that Remus had suggested three very particular tomes to remind him of all the ways in which he had fucked up royally at being a friend or more since they were thirteen. He thought likely this would come up sooner or later but he was not exactly prepared for it so he said “I liked them.” 

“Which was your favorite?” 

“I liked _Desert Golgotha_.” It had given him a secret thrill to turn to the acknowledgements page at the end of the book and see, _Overwhelming thanks due to my tireless, fearless, and completely brilliant research assistant in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico: Remus Lupin._ It had also instilled in him a rabid sort of jealousy, and he had wondered while he laid awake the exact nature of Remus’s relationship with Dr. Lourdes Rodriguez. “You lived in a town called Truth or Consequences?” 

“There’s a school of magic in Las Cruces. I was a substitute teacher for a while. Until — you know, I guess, the obvious.” 

“How long were you in America?” 

Remus looked into his tea, as though he were studying the leaves for signs. “I flew to Canada in May 1982. And then I flew back to Heathrow the day I heard you had escaped from Azkaban.” 

“Were you the whole time in — ” 

“I can show you — I have some slides. I was in Canada for about a year. Then I went to the desert. When everything happened I was in Seattle. I taught at a magic school for girls on Bainbridge Island.” 

They did not look at the slides until weeks later and most of them were blurry landscapes in shades of green and red and blue and grey. In one or two images Remus himself appeared — walking the strip in Las Vegas, smoking a cigarette on the California coast, standing before the Grand Canyon and numerous arrays of snow-capped and violet-majestic mountains. Beside a strange monolith on the desert he said was the monument at the Trinity atomic bomb test site. Beneath his feet (he wore boots of a military heft) the desert had a strange greenish tint. “It’s turned to a sort of splintering glass,” he said. “They’ve classified it as a new element — Trinitite.” In all the photographs he looked very dark and cold. Like a shade of something captured from some parallel world. He looked as though he had not aged at all since the time he was twenty-one. But he also looked like he was a thousand years old. 

Remus kept the slides in a large plastic box in a closet and with the wheels of them were other loose prints he showed Sirius at the kitchen table while they drank whiskey, and they were photographs from his research with Dr. Rodriguez in New Mexico in 1987. Not long after the publication of the book, he said, he had received a message from Dumbledore (which included compliments on the important discoveries) and as such had fled the state, to the Northwest, where he lived until 1993 taking various and sundry research and teaching jobs. 

The photographs from New Mexico were dark and strange and gestural, and they seemed like abstract art. Remus had taken them with a Muggle camera he had rigged with quite a bit of magic to capture movement along certain desert trails he and Dr. Rodriguez had reason to believe were trafficked by cryptids. This vocabulary, Remus explained, was used in wizarding academia to describe magical beasts and beings who were as yet unclassified or of questionable realness. Muggles referred to numerous magical beasts and beings who did in fact exist, such as the chupacabra and the sasquatch, as cryptids; the magical definition shrunk this pool considerably. Relatively few cryptids remained to wizarding academics, and a disproportionate number of them had been reported in the American Southwest. Dr. Rodriguez’s thesis was that this was in some way connected to that desert’s nuclear history — as the source and the building and the proving ground for the atomic bomb. 

In the images from Remus’s trail cameras there were shapes of things which had been caught in the flashbulb which seemed like patterns of moving light until Remus traced the shape of them. He laid out several series of photographs in time-lapse order so Sirius could see how the creatures moved. They were shrunken and bizarre and they moved on too many or too few limbs torturedly dragging their bodies through the sand. Remus had also in the boxes plaster casts he and Dr. Rodriguez had made of their tracks, and he had in tiny plastic baggies bits of hair and feathers and scales and claws. 

“They are certainly intelligent,” said Remus. There was something cold in his voice. Outside the sound of the crickets was roaring and it was very dark but for the moon, which was waxing again, and they had been studying all the ephemera for hours and it had gotten very dark except for the light above the dining room table. “I camped in the desert a couple times looking for them. It was so dark you could see the lights and stuff from White Sands even from far away. They would come up around to the tent and I could hear them — communicating, I guess. But I would try to go out and they would disappear. I think they might have magic like house elves do. But we could never really prove it.” 

He recognized himself in every tortured thing; Sirius had known this since 1971. It was why, he thought sometimes, they had fallen in love with each other in the first place, however unfortunately. 

\--

After two weeks they fought explosively, and then Sirius sat at the table and watched while Remus choked down that horrible potion, and then they went in the basement together, and Remus turned into a wolf, and they fought explosively again. He understood a condition of the potion was that it was truly Remus conscious inside the creature but regardless it had always been easier for them to fight this way. In the morning he helped Remus up the stairs and into his bedroom, which was very spare. It had been his parents’ bedroom when they were alive but he had taken down all the artwork and the long strings of Tibetan prayer flags and the Kente cloths and tapestries acquired in Remus’s father’s travels, and he had put all of it in his childhood room for storage, along with much other ephemera Sirius sensed was too painful for him to view with regularity. He had tacked to the wall an old Gryffindor pennant and an Ansel Adams photograph of the Grand Canyon, both of which were crooked. 

Sirius went to the kitchen and made chamomile tea, but when he brought it back to the bedroom Remus was asleep. 

\--

On the evening of the new moon Remus had gone to town for groceries and Sirius searched through his box of records, which he had not dared to do in much depth since his arrival. Amongst all the records — old ones he recognized and some he did not, and some he thought should have been there, but which were missing — he came across an LP called _Painful_ by a band called Yo La Tengo. He put it on and listened, and eventually he abandoned the book he had been reading and just listened, and he was in the middle of it, in the squalling feedback-roar of “Nowhere Near,” when Remus came back. 

“Are you playing my records,” he said when Sirius followed him into the kitchen to unpack the grocery bags, but he wouldn’t look at Sirius, and something in his voice was difficult to read. 

“Just the one. It’s quite good.” 

“It’s — well we ought to listen to all those shoegaze bands, after this.” 

He then had to explain shoegaze to Sirius, whilst Sirius grated assorted cheeses and Remus cut vegetables. Their backs to one another in the small kitchen felt almost jarringly intimate. After not so very long Remus said, “This song is my favorite.” 

As was sort of a tenant of shoegaze, Sirius supposed based on the lesson, it started kind of unassuming, and then it turned very loud, and Remus went quickly in the other room to turn it up still louder. The bass was low and heavy moving and compiling upon itself like a thundercloud. Then the singer in all his voice’s pale delicacy amidst the wildness of sound intoned, “ _I was the fool beside you for too long…_ ”

A chill went all the way up Sirius’s spine into his hair, and he stopped grating cheese. 

“ _The things about you that would drive me wild still drive me wild but now in a different way — I was the fool beside you, for too long —_ ” 

Behind him he heard that Remus had stopped cutting vegetables. With a slow and gentle care he put the knife he had been using down beside his cutting board. 

“When did this come out,” Sirius asked, trying to sound jovial. 

“About two years ago.” 

Everything was very still. Like waking up at dawn on a day when something terrible would happen. Waking up at dawn in their flat in Camden Town and his arm was numb because Remus had fallen asleep on it. Everything was an unholy mess, and on the street it was silent, and the fog weighed about six tons, and something was moving beyond it which he could not see. 

“You must’ve — ”

“Every goddamn record that came out in twelve fucking years I was thinking about you if you must know.” Remus had started opening cabinet doors in search of something but either could not find it or was doing this just for effect. “I don’t know why Muggles always want to write songs about — about love and betrayal. What do any of them fucking think they know?” 

This moment seemed fragile as ice or lace. Sirius turned slowly away from the grated cheese. Remus had opened every cabinet in the kitchen and the open mouths of them all seemed to scream, but he had not found whatever he was looking for, and now he stood very still. 

“I’m sorrier than hell,” Remus said at last. He had fixed Sirius with the eyes. To think he had forgotten about this expression, which was like a sort of binding covenant. “It fucking kills me. Do you know that?” 

He supposed he did. “I know — well I — ” 

“It hurts to be around you,” Remus told him. “It’s — I’m dying. I wish you would kiss me.” He wouldn’t look at Sirius and instead he watched into the other room, where the music came from. “But I would understand, you know, if — ” 

Sirius kissed him. Evidently he had bought a bar of very dark chocolate in town and eaten it all on the walk home, because he tasted like it, rich and bitter, and Sirius touched his hair at the nape of his neck and behind his ear where it was very soft. He remembered when they kissed for the first time Remus had tasted like oranges, and then he had kicked Sirius out of his bed, and then he had had to spend very many months patching up everything he had broken (he had never, he thought, managed to fix it entirely) before Remus would condescend to be kissed again. After that he had made for Sirius a great deal of other allowances, and Sirius had continued to make mistakes. But he supposed he also had made allowances, and Remus had certainly made mistakes. 

They stood in the kitchen kissing for a long time. The record ended, and they kissed to the sound of the crickets in the yard, which also was pleasant. Remus’s eyes were not quite closed. When they pulled apart the shadows had changed, and the cabinet doors were still open. “We should put on _Loveless_ ,” Remus said, against Sirius’s mouth. 

“What?” 

“I thought you were — ” He smiled, and he pushed a little at Sirius’s shoulder. “You were enjoying the shoegaze.” 

Instead Sirius went to the record player and put on Led Zeppelin II. When he looked up Remus was standing in the kitchen threshold, and his hair was a mess, and in his eyes was that binding covenant again. But he had folded his arms over his chest and was trying to look unbothered. 

“I’m not even sure if this will work,” Sirius said. 

He was talking about sex. But Remus said, “It never has, really, has it.” 

“We can talk about that later. Come to bed.” 

By which of course he meant the fold-out sofa where he had been sleeping, so they could be near the record player. Both of them were loathe to get naked though the dusk light was flattering and anyway when he finally managed it Remus stared at all his tattoos with his mouth open just a little and he seemed rather overwhelmed. He himself had sealed his hand over the panel of Remus’s ribs where Greyback’s bite was and then he touched the vivid lightning knot of wounds on Remus’s thigh which he had given to himself in the Event of their fifth year. Now they both had map-marks, he was realizing. Vivid manifest memory. _Physical Graffiti._

In the end they had sex on the floor, between the pale hardwoods and the sun-bleached Oriental rug, because it seemed a real possibility that the sofa bed might fold back in on itself violently and without warning, and after a little while Remus put the Yo La Tengo record back on. Sirius was worried he might have forgotten how to do this but he had not, though it became rather quickly clear that it was going to have to be different than it was in the all sanctified static memory. 

“I don’t want, Sirius, I don’t want to come, if you can’t,” Remus said, but he was lying, because he had arched up just a little from the small of his back, and his grip on Sirius’s shoulder was almost painful. 

Sirius pressed his lips and then his teeth and then his palm against Remus’s throat. Whispered in his ear, shh. A third finger inside him. Perhaps this should not have felt like a kind of vengeance. 

Of course it had worked. It had always worked and it was the only thing that worked. But it worked like — he thought of the creatures in Remus’s trail camera stills. It dragged itself sufferingly, monstrously, torturedly through the desert. It had been put through the unimaginable and still it lived. If existing as such could be called living. 

Remus watched his face like to read something in it. His eyes kept slipping but he wouldn’t close them. Sirius could feel the pulse beneath Remus’s jaw like some engine running and running and running at the center of the world. Percussive like a gun or like far-off thunder wild in the darkness. He pressed in tightly at Remus’s throat and crooked his fingers inside him and Remus’s grip on his shoulder tightened painfully and then it loosened, and Sirius felt something that was a voice and not a voice like some interstellar radio vibration; under him Remus arched, his face cleared of everything, a kind of impossible and false and blinded peace, and Sirius remembered some line of prose or something from somewhere he could not recall: _and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn_. 

\--

Afterward, they lay in the fading light on the oriental rug. Remus tried to jerk him off for a while but nothing happened and eventually Sirius told him to give up. “I’ve been trying,” he said. “It isn’t anything to do with you.” He was thinking in fact Remus looked better to him than he ever had before despite more of his hair was grey and his very thinness now that he was thirty-five seemed less haphazard and punk and more disconcerting. Amidst the scars here and there he had freckles and birthmarks from sun that Sirius had not seen before, constellated high on his shoulders and around his knees and ankles, at all the kind of compass points of bones he had once been able to navigate in the pitch dark. 

There was no moon and so there was hardly any light but for the bulb above the stove in the kitchen. Remus had been touching the marks Sirius had done at his belly and inside his hip with ink transfigured painstakingly from blood. In Azkaban he had not remembered any faces nor any names and he had remembered some things, like deep base sorts of magic things, by what he had chalked up to Spiritus Mundi or otherwise to miracle. Among these were a handful of Icelandic staves ( _draumstafir_ and _skelkunarstafur_ ) and a single later Futhark rune, _ear_ , the one which referred to the personification of death. He had recalled a stanza from the Waste Land (“On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing…”) and he had recalled the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” On the worse days he had not quite remembered his name, or that he was truly alive; he felt like a reliquary or a repository of memory, like a redlight movie theater, or like a broken record, and he was possessed by it, it was all he was — 

When he had remembered snatches of what his physical body could do besides lean against the wall and lie in the floor and twitch in waking nightmare and chatter with cold and ache desperately in the eternal stillness he had remembered running and running and running in the woods. Playing Quidditch with James and the frost burning in his lungs and chest of the cold sweet air smelling like autumn or like snow. Dancing at a punk show with Marlene and Dorcas and when they would come out on the street afterward and have a cigarette in the night chill atomizing all their shared sweat electrically. When Talking Heads’ _Remain in Light_ came out, and everyone was dying, and he and Remus would spend all day in bed fucking with the record on as loud as it would go on the turntable in the kitchen, and it was around that time he had learned if he put at least one hand on Remus’s throat and tightened it something almost magical would happen which they never spoke about. 

“I was so horrible to you,” Sirius said after a long time. “So I think I understand why, why you believed it.” 

Remus sighed. “It seemed like you’d successfully radicalized yourself out of all your childhood pureblood ideology but for that one thing,” he said. “And I — well I have an evil piece of myself too so I forgave you for it.” He sat up, and his knees cracked, all his bones shifted under his skin in the pale light and shadow, and Sirius reached to touch the scars on his thigh again. “But then I was thinking — what if you had acted it all so successfully and that was just the piece you couldn’t hide?” 

Remus took his cigarettes from the side table and conjured a bright blue flame in his fingers (the light cast his face and chest in an eerie underwater glow) and lit one, which he put in Sirius’s mouth. Then he lit a second for himself. 

“I knew, you know, that it was real. Obviously, I mean, now for certain, I know it. So I was trying the whole time to convince myself that I had been wrong. But I could never — I couldn’t completely believe it. And I think because I couldn’t believe it I never got over it. And so now the scenario is so plain as to be rather funny, and it is, this whole time I was not wrong, but I did not believe myself, and so. Here we are.” 

Sirius could not remember if Remus had ever before talked about anything of this nature in such depth. He thumbed across the long cornice of the old tearing wound inside Remus’s thigh and was silent. 

“It’s the same as you did with me I suppose. In a different way.” He reached up onto the side table to ash his cigarette. “I can’t tell you, God, how fucking sorry — but perhaps we should talk about this later.” 

Remus helped him up and they dressed haphazardly and made an omelet quickly for dinner and kissed each other against the counters and Sirius felt, perhaps wishfully, something vaguely carnal in his blood stirring as he watched Remus, bare-assed (he had put his big navy-wool fisherman’s sweater on and that was it; he had always done this when he would make a post-coital snack in their Camden Town flat, and Sirius had no doubt it was an attempt to jog his memory), reach up into one of the high counters for herbes de provence. 

They ate together at the dining room table and then they folded up the sofa and went down the hall to the bedroom where they lay in the bed together kissing for a while longer until Remus fell asleep. Sirius watched out the far windows at the high grasses and the overgrown garden and the bush of currants and the spreading wheel of stars, and he thought, in the morning we will go together searching into the heart of darkness, through that mausoleum room of everything… 


	9. things you said at the kitchen table

Remus had returned to Grimmauld Place sometime in the night and as such when Sirius came down in the morning to make tea he was asleep at the kitchen table having balled up his coat as a makeshift pillow. He had finished the bottle of wine Sirius had left out, and it was beside his gently curled hand on the table. His face was pale, and his boots were still on. Sirius woke him with a hand on his back. 

“Want a cup of tea?” 

“Sure.” His voice was soft with sleep. “Have you any toast or anything.” 

“Molly sent over like a bucket of scones by owl.” 

He had been surviving mostly on food delivered by Molly Weasley, which was fine because she was a wonderful cook, and she provided mostly finished meals he could heat up with simple magic, which made him feel rather like an invalid. Which he supposed was rather the way most of them considered him. Remus, when he was over, which was all too rarely, would go out and get cashew curry and butter chicken and pakoras and dosas and all sorts of delicious things, and new records, and weed, perhaps best of all. They would get stoned and listen to music and fuck and bake shortbread and then Remus would go out to the corner store and buy ice cream. And then Dumbledore would send an owl requesting the immediate honor of Remus’s presence at some or another necessary part-human liaison, and Sirius would wander the house feeling like his skin was being chewed at from inside by rats or cockroaches or something else with tiny jaws and little feet for running. He sat on the floor in his old bedroom and listened to Led Zeppelin IV and wrote long and detailed nuanced letters to Remus, Dumbledore, Harry, and everyone else he knew delineating the various and sundry ways he could tell he was losing his mind. 

Remus found the old biscuit tin magically extended to contain maximum scones and took two out, which he heated with magic. Then he sat down again and took his boots off. There was a hole in one of his colorless wool socks stretched over his heel. “How was your trip,” Sirius asked. 

“Fine. Actually it was better than fine. It was a coven of banshees up in Orkney. They wanted to remain neutral unless their island was attacked but eventually they agreed they’d join our side if Voldemort threatened Scotland.” 

“Banshees, eh?” 

“Yes, they were all very beautiful, and they spoke very quietly, because otherwise, you know.” He was smiling a little, proud of himself. “It’s a sign of respect if they speak quietly.” 

When they were in school, Frank Longbottom had had a cassette tape of what were reportedly banshee howls. Recorded they had a spine-chilling effect that was less fatal than the real-life equivalent but still made your face and gut feel numbish or sick for a quarter hour or so. At the time Frank was otherwise listening to Throbbing Gristle’s _Second Annual Report,_ which sounded not dissimilar. 

“I’d’ve been scared shitless to be in the same room with a whole coven of them.” 

“No you wouldn’t’ve. Once you saw them you would be staring with your mouth open like you do.” 

He started to say he didn’t recall ever doing that but he knew he did sometimes at Remus and at the photographs of Veela delegations in the _Prophet_. He thought if he ever got out of this house living again he would be staring with his mouth open at every person he saw just for the shocking newness of their faces. So instead of arguing the point he brought Remus his mug of tea and sat across from him at the table and broke off a corner of one of Molly’s scones. “You could’ve come upstairs to bed,” he told Remus, feeling not unpetulant. 

“I was going to,” said Remus, but then he stopped. 

“Also you agreed not to touch any of my parents’ wine unless I poison tested it for you first.” 

“I did not agree to that and besides this bottle was open.” 

“That means precisely nothing. I do not doubt some of these bottles have been open for twenty years.” 

“I know now,” Remus said, “for the future,” but he was smiling; he had rested his cheek in the palm of one hand propped up against the table, and his long pale hand wrapped his mug tightly for the warmth of it. 

“You’re falling asleep.” 

“Am not.” 

“You should’ve come upstairs — ”

“I didn’t want — ” he yawned — “to wake you up.” 

Certainly I was awake staring at the ceiling thinking either about my certain doom or about you, Sirius did not say. Or else dreaming about one of the two, or possibly both, which was customary. In his dreams he ran through the house which seemed to grow darknesses searching for Remus. The portrait of his mother was screaming and they were not alone on the stairs and in the rooms. At last he opened the door to the basement and death came screaming out of it and he walked into his cell in Azkaban. When he woke it did not feel like waking. He walked through the house pretending he was doing something else but he was looking for Remus or the ghost of him which certainly was present and the house elf watched him from the corners. 

To Remus he said, “It’s okay if you wake me up.” 

Unsaid: I am only certain I am awake when you are here. And even that is an iffy thing sometimes. 

\--

They went upstairs and Remus passed out in all his clothes in Sirius’s bed while they were talking. For a while Sirius sat next to him and read the newspapers he had brought, which included several radicalist publications from America and assorted part-human advocacy groups from throughout Europe. Remus had tiredly explained that the banshees had seen fit to expand his library and as such had passed off copies of almost every zine of which they had doubles. They hated the Ministry but they also hated Voldemort, who was obviously a Dark rewrite of the same patriarchal mores; this viewpoint was shared, they said, by most part-human radicals who were not white male human-passing. This had initially made them skeptical of Remus, who of course was white male human-passing. Sirius did not ask how Remus had convinced them of his more nuanced politics. 

Sirius read halfway through a few zines, pausing to read most thoroughly through one publication in particular, a biannual journal of political poetry and comics by a mountain tribe of hags living in the French Alps. He fell asleep shortly after finishing it, sitting up against the pillows, with one hand in Remus’s hair, and when he woke the light had changed in the window, and Remus had taken his hand and held it. This never failed to make him feel punched in the gut or something. 

\--

The relative genius of Azkaban, and of dementors, was the construction by which one’s own memories were used as the most effective device for one’s endless torture. Sirius had long expected that for prisoners such as his cousin Bellatrix this wasn’t quite effectual; after all it seemed likely Bellatrix got off on all the worst things she’d ever done. As for Sirius himself he was initially surprised, before that feeling was systematically erased from his feelable repertory of emotions, at how thoroughly he had misremembered, or unremembered, or balled up and squashed and silenced, some of his particularly terrible youthful (and not-so-youthful) behaviors. The dementors quickly learned what troubled him and what did not. He was not so hurt by infinite static loops of his cruelty to Snape or to Peter, to whom he now wished he had been more cruel. The worst thing, which they discovered quickly and then endeavored to utilize whenever possible, was his memory of the confrontation in fifth year in which he had told Snape, if you think you know so much why don’t you go see for yourself? 

He had not remembered what he had said, and most of it he had managed to forget about, except for the good things that had come of it, like how Remus had forgiven him, and everything that had happened after that, and how Snape had not so much bothered them again. But quickly he found sometimes the only thing he could draw into his memory — even before his hunger, or his need to breathe, or his certainty (rapidly decaying) that he was a self who lived in a body — was the rough brushed-off cadence of what he had said. Snape’s face twisting in realization. The golden orgasmic flood through himself of a good prank set in motion. The light on the floor when he sauntered off down the hallway. And, many evenings later, sitting by Remus’s bed, and Remus smelled like blood and hospital, and he had ripped himself to pieces, and in the pale blue moonlight his skin was very pale, and Sirius realized in a way he had not fully grasped before that this was the very gentle disappointed soul he had nearly made a killer. Sometimes alongside this memory he could recall the first times he had watched Remus change, in the splintering shattering shrieking shack, his body twisted, twisting, bent impossibly in on itself, stretched and crunched like a child’s toy in invisible hands. Here occasionally he could summon the filament of another line of poetry: _beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure…_

Of course at this time he had remembered neither Remus’s name nor his face really but rather a confused tangle of love and fear and obligation which his scrambled mind titled only Guilt. 

\--

Several days later Remus had to go away again to visit with a vampire cult and several days after that, very late in the evening as Sirius was making hot cocoa to spike liberally with whiskey, Dumbledore sent an owl carrying a letter on St. Mungo’s stationary. 

_Against my better judgement, Remus has instructed me to owl you because you are expecting him tonight at Grimmauld Place._

Sirius in fact was not expecting Remus to return that night because customarily Remus showed up out of nowhere. But this was a clever and very Remus-like ruse. 

_There was a mishap with the Laurentine vampire cult_ , the letter continued _, and he was entrapped. Luckily he was able to send a Patronus and was evacuated before fatal exsanguination. I must say I am surprised as vampires do not customarily drink werewolf blood even in extremity (a tragic example of bias even within the larger part-human community). Currently he is conscious and we are awaiting a werewolf blood transfusion which is being owled from Liverpool._

_I must entreat you NOT to come to St. Mungo’s. And in fact I have taken the liberty of putting assorted wards on Grimmauld Place to prevent your departure. I hope you understand 1) this is for your own safety and 2) that you are of entirely no use to me or Remus at present._

Sirius burned the letter without quite realizing what he was doing. His heart was slamming against the cage of ribs. He stormed to the front door, nearly awakening the portrait of his mother, and he tugged on the doorknob, and tried all the spells he could remember of opening and unlocking and parting and lifting enchantment, but nothing worked. 

So he returned the table, where the owl waited, looking curious and unruffled, and wrote a return letter. His hand shook with anger and fear and otherwise and he started several vitriolic rants before he wrote a quick and simple one: 

_Thank you for keeping me in the loop. I hope you will consider bringing Remus here when he is allowed to leave the hospital. My best for his speedy recovery. — S_

He was really quite a coward, he thought, when he sent the letter off again, and he wondered if Dumbledore knew anything about the two of them, or if he just suspected, and what he thought about it; perhaps Remus had told him after the Event, or perhaps he had gleaned the pathetic and obvious, which was that two people who had been put through the literal and metaphysical wringer on one another’s account so many times and still condescended to entertain the other’s company must have been in love. 

\--

He didn’t sleep much, and in another day or so he woke up in the night and went down to the kitchen for the whiskey and Remus was at the table eating toast and reading the _Prophet_. His face was very pale, and he was holding his chin up in the palm of his hand, and he wore a few pale white bandages in strategic places; at his neck, and inside both wrists, and no doubt there were others elsewhere, inside his clothes. Sirius put the teakettle on and sat across from him and carefully and slowly as if it pained him Remus folded the paper and pushed it away. The headline read _Vampire Cult on Murderous Rampage in York_. 

“You should’ve come upstairs to bed.” 

“I’ve only been here twenty minutes.” 

Sirius reached across the table and grasped Remus’s open hand and held it. Inside the wrist the bandage bore a crepuscular yellow stain where the wound there leaked as it healed. He looked rather like an attempted suicide released from the psych ward for a thorough family guilting, but his hand tightened just a little around Sirius’s and then loosed again. 

“How do you feel?” 

“Like horrible shit. My head still hurts. It’s probably no fun to be drained of blood under any circumstance but — ” here he had to pause to take a breath — “less so when the entire time — I could hear them talking about how, how horrible it tasted.” 

At another time he might’ve said, you’ve always tasted good to me, or he might’ve laughed. Or he might’ve asked what exactly a vampire bite looked like. Instead he waited. 

“The doctors said no sex or, or strenuous activity of any kind for a week.” 

“At least the old man can’t send you away again posthaste.” 

“At least,” said Remus. “At least.” He looked off above Sirius’s shoulder and his eyes were bright with pain and his lips and fingernails and eyelids still had an otherworldly sort of dawnlike violet tinge to them from the blood loss. “Thin, they kept saying. And muddy. Like silt.” 

“I can’t believe you remember.” 

“At the hospital they had to order special blood they didn’t have on-premises. Like they couldn’t waste good magic blood giving it to me.” 

“See, it’s — ” 

Remus fixed him with the eyes and he almost stopped in his tracks and said nothing at all. But he had laid awake too long utterly certain of this not to say it: 

“Even if they aren’t blood purist nutjobs like my family was or like the Malfoys or whatnot — that ghost, you know, the suggestion of it, of fear and, and bias, it’s in everybody. It’s hard to — I don't think I ever shook it all the way. I tried.” 

“I certainly haven’t it shaken it all the way and this is — it lives in me. It is me.” 

Sirius bit his tongue. He had always wanted to say, _it isn’t you_ , but it was. 

“You did try,” Remus went on. “I think that was the worst thing about it. You tried really fucking hard but you didn’t learn. Now I think maybe you almost know. But it — it was forced upon you.” 

“I had to — well, I remembered, in Azkaban, everything I said.” Remus’s face was still. Sirius understood _everything I said_ could refer to a round ten years of general idiocy and unconscious cruelty. “Everything I told Snape that day,” he clarified, “fifth year.” 

Slowly as if it pained him to do so Remus pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. His sigh was a very loud sound in the quiet room but more than anything it was very tired. 

“I remembered it,” Sirius said again. “Over and over. If you want to — ”

“I don’t want to hear it; I don’t want to know what you said.” 

“It’s just you shouldn’t — ”

“Don’t tell me what I shouldn’t.” 

“I don’t want you to let me slide anymore.” 

The teakettle boiled, screaming into the quietude, and Sirius was obliged to get up to take it off the heat, because if he did not it had been known upon occasion to wake the portrait of his mother. When he turned the burner off the silence in the room started ringing in his ears and he found he dreaded turning back around. He took his very sweet time making ginger tea for Remus with honey and lemon. 

“Fine,” Remus said, at last, loudly. 

When Sirius turned around with the two teacups Remus had wrestled his sweater off. Inside his elbows were more bandages. Everyplace the bright blue veins touched the skin. “What’s fine?” Sirius asked. 

“I don’t want to know what you said to Severus in fucking 1976. It’s so long over now. Perhaps I shouldn’t’ve forgiven you but I did and I lived unhappily ever after but I wouldn’t — I can’t think about all the chaos theory of it, because I don’t regret it. I just — I need you to listen. Will you listen?” 

“Of course. Of course I — ” 

“I only ever wished you would try to imagine — to put yourself in my head for all of five seconds and you would see — ” 

Perhaps Remus was talking about something else but Sirius imagined the end of it. The final ebbing of all things, 1981. At the time he figured he had desperately sought a narrative that suited what he had constructed inside his mind. Himself, abominably persecuted by an unexpected foe. Heroically betrayed. Unwilling to take whatever decisive action others deemed necessary because some piece of his soul understood Remus could be innocent. He had trusted where he should not have. He had refused to succumb to stereotype and bigotry and in the end his wild and heedless love had doomed him. In those days he would wake up in the night and Remus would be awake and watching him and in his eyes was some impossible thunderstorm quotient of hurt Sirius could not subdivide into what he had constructed to be true. So he had turned over again and stared at the window. 

“I do think you know me,” Remus said. “Now you do. You’re the only person left alive.” 

They finished their tea and went upstairs and he helped Remus change his bandages. It was nearly dawn and the light started coming in through the window paler and paler in the wash of morning. The little wounds were vivid and dark and deep and bruising yellow around the mirrorish black pits of them and Remus looked at them with a kind of cold awe as though he were surprised and disappointed to be alive after all of it. Inside his left arm the bruise was particularly large, because it was where he had been given the transfusion in the hospital. “I would give you my blood,” Sirius told him. 

“It wouldn’t take,” Remus said. He was watching Sirius daub the yellowing bruises with arnica cream from a Muggle pharmacy, and he was very close and his breath smelled like lemon and ginger. “It’s Muggle science. I have a rare type so.” 

“Too bad.” 

“I appreciate — I’m honored by the sentiment.” 

They drew the shades tightly and fell asleep, and around noon Sirius woke up when Remus went to the record player. In the soft light he looked already less pale, and he crouched and put on one of his old Leonard Cohen records. After not so very long Sirius fell asleep again and dreamed about a field of wildflowers. 


	10. things you said under the stars and in the grass

The lighthouse was tall and whitewashed and built of brick reinforced a few times with plaster. Inside it was cold. He would be obliged to sleep in the two-room house adjoining the tower, which was also cold, and the walls were bare, and the bed was very small and strewn with moth-eaten wool blankets, and there was no food in the kitchen cabinets but for a carton of oats which was empty because a mouse or something had chewed a hole in the back and secreted it all away grain by grain. 

He climbed to the top of the tower and looked out over the bay and beyond the bay the sea. He looked inland but couldn’t see beyond the black ridge of trees. And the stretching blue-grey sky was getting dark. In the center of the octagonal room in its careful spinning case the light was a kind of sheer prismatic bell. Its filaments were magic — a glowing bright thing like a Patronus, but it was not warm, and it dispersed none of the cold black shroud. 

He went back down to the house and wrote a letter. 

_Suspecting this does not matter because perhaps I am dead and this is death. I suppose it would be very fitting to be assigned to purgatory. But if I am alive I am in need of food and also to know what you need me to do here because the light is automated. — RJL_

\--

He slept and didn’t remember his dreams and when he woke up just past dawn he went and walked along the beach in the fog with a cigarette. He reasoned perhaps he should have asked the old man also to send along more cigarettes if he was in fact alive and this was in fact reality. The waves lapped the shore and he crouched and filled his pockets with shells and seaglass and the birds called far away across the water and sometimes he saw their tracks in the sand but he did not see them. The fog was low and heavy and there was nothing beyond it. Then he walked inland, but after not so very long the brush grew too thick to continue through, and he returned to the lighthouse, where three large dark owls waited for him, having carried between them a large canvas parcel of assorted foodstuffs. 

_A course of Wolfsbane and a ration for two weeks_ , Dumbledore had written. This seemed optimistic. _I assure you that you are still alive._

Nothing more, not that it mattered. He was beginning to feel rather like one of the magical colonial explorers of old living in the bush harvesting potions ingredients and recording magic ethnographies of the local natives. Now and again receiving cryptic transmission from the old world. Uncertain of when or where he was, or how long he could survive there, or what would be necessary to continue to enact the course of empire. 

\--

In the night he woke electrically from a dream feeling this pulse or thread of something like a yearning. It took a fist of all his veins and tugged. At first he thought still it was the dream he was feeling and so he shut his eyes again but could not sleep. At last he rose from the bed barefoot and followed it. 

A storm was coming in obscuring the waxing sliver of moon and the pulled-tight sheaf of stars. The headwash of rain was needle-thin like a kind of living mist and it was so like the endless winter rain had been when he had lived in Seattle many years previous that he began to approximately conceptualize where he might be. In the tower above the light was growing so dim it cast a weak light against the clouds which seemed to shatter and fall into the sea. 

He climbed up to fix it; he was thinking about the dream. In it was the same as every dream. 

In the octagonal room with the light he tried _lumos_ and _lumos maxima_ and all the spells he knew for light but it only kept getting dimmer and at last it was nearly pure dark and the rain began to lash the blown-glass windows like the rinse in a Muggle car wash. He had seen all in the day no ships and there were no waves that broke far out on a hidden shoal or something even at lowest tide and as such he wasn’t certain what exactly he was guiding but he had begun to think about Slint’s “Good Morning Captain” and he had begun to panic. 

He shut his eyes and leaned into it. It did not so much tell him what to do as remind him of his initial referent — a Patronus. This seemed rather a cruel turn of events as this spell he had not attempted since the very day. 

When he had come to the house to entrap Remus with a Portkey Dumbledore had looked around for Dark magic fixings or heroin works or Pensieve jars or any other mechanisms of self-induced oblivion. Remus was affronted by this but then again he had taken two teacups down on reflex even before the old man’s arrival, and he had not taken the kitchen trash out in several weeks, which would have been fine, because he hardly ate anything, except that mice (or, knowing the Blacks, some Dark varietal of mice) had chewed through the bin. He had gone through his tapes and records, he wanted to tell Dumbledore, and he had separated them out into three piles (ones he could never listen to again, which he was going to give to Harry, and ones he could only listen to if he wanted to claw the wound back open and push his nails in it, and ones he thought perhaps he could be trusted to own), and he had called Heathrow and figured out the time (4:37pm) of the daily flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, because he had been imagining going back and walking into the desert and never coming out. In short he had been productive. In all the endeavor he had only spent one entire day in bed and it was the day after it had happened, which he thought was fair. Stages of grief and all that. 

“I must admit I feared the worst, Remus,” Dumbledore said, opening a desk drawer in the drawing room rather warily; “Molly wrote to me as she hasn’t been able to reach you.” 

Molly who had hated Sirius perhaps rightfully had sent several six-page letters which Remus had read and yet could not bear to respond to. They were stacked on the bedside table in the upstairs room. 

“I’m concerned about your being alone here.” 

I have nowhere else to go, he did not say. Neither of us had anywhere else to go but here or death. 

Sometimes it felt like something behind him drawing a cold shadow up his spine. The absence of presence. Like a manifest nothing. 

The old man looked at his pocket watch. “Go upstairs and pack your things.” 

“What?” 

“Essentials only, Remus, and be quick about it; we don’t have all day.” 

He figured Dumbledore would send him off again to some other destitute backwoods contingent of centaurs or hags or werewolves living off Ministry subsidies and venison they’d poached, haughty and proud and skittish and fearful, robbed, wrecked, stripped bare; he thought, perhaps this time I will not come back. So he left all the records, but he took a few tapes from piles B and C, and luckily he took a raincoat. 

At the bottom of the stairs Dumbledore was waiting with something he pressed into Remus’s hand. When he opened his eyes again he was standing before the lighthouse. The thing in his hand was a small and soft black soapstone carving of a dog. He was nauseous and disoriented and he nearly threw it in the sea. But he had put it on the windowsill in the house with the papery hollow carcasses of grasshoppers left there by some previous resident — like it was some ritual fetish object which contained inside it the spirit of something else. He imagined Dumbledore had found it at some West Country estate sale before anything had happened. Suspecting. Perhaps it had been in his possession for years. Perhaps he had bewitched it somehow even beyond the obvious. 

He tried to grasp it — the happiest he had been. When Sirius had come to his parents’ house in Somerset. Otherwise it would be from the Summer of 1978 when everything was kind of simmering just beneath the surface and if one dedicated oneself enough to the practice of it anything could be ignored. Even the front page of the _Prophet_ ’s increasing direness and all the missing persons in the classifieds. That was a time he tended to remember with a kind of gothic consciousness and of course it had been worse when he had believed Sirius guilty. Like the whole time he had been so willfully — like he had only seen, blindered like a horse, or muzzled like a dog, into Sirius’s eyes and not much further. But always, eternally, _et in arcadia ego_ ; he thought about tattooing it on himself, as Sirius had done in prison all the Icelandic magical staves. 

It happened very suddenly: he remembered the smudged and hasty marks, blurring out inside Sirius’s skin, and touching them; they were in bed together and it was very warm, and he had put Leonard Cohen on the stereo, and outside it was dawn. And the birds were singing. He had not really been all that happy he supposed because such was the condition of the war. And Voldemort was back, and he could tell there was something curdling in Sirius’s mind, some open secret stretching out like toffee candy. But it was like the world stood still just for as long as was purely necessary. 

Almost without thinking he said, _Expecto Patronum_. In its spinning jewel case the light flared again so brightly he had to cover his eyes. 

\--

He slept until dawn when the tugging woke him again and he was obliged to climb the stairs and cast a spell strong enough to keep the light running for long enough to try and cut his way inland with magic. The storm had moved off in the night but there was new driftwood and jetsam washed up along the beach and the air smelled clear. The fog was so low and heavy in the trees it looked like some primordial incubator for prehistoric life. Still there were no visible birds, though he could hear their calls, and there were no ships at sea; the only life was a slug he stepped on barefoot on his way upstairs. 

This time he tried a memory from summer ’78: the morning Sirius had burned the frittata he was trying to make for some reason, and he himself had realized he had to do laundry but wasn’t quite certain how, so they had avoided the whole issue by getting stoned and fucking on the couch. A memory in which he felt almost embarrassed now by how happy he had been and how young. And how naive. 

When he had coaxed the light to flare up again he went down into the forest and labored for hours to cut a path. For two weeks (the cold stone dropped) he hadn’t really been able to think of much beyond the obvious but now it was like a sort of ambient hum that occasionally changed volume. Over it as he worked he was thinking about the old man, who it seemed had sent him to this godforsaken coastal purgatory to self-flagellate with his own memory to prevent him from toasting it all with magic or otherwise. All to guide to safety some traveller he could not see. 

Everything the old man did had a reason on its face and a secret one too. So it was a matter of sussing out the second, because the first was obviously to keep him busy and from doing something very rash (suicide, bad drugs, Dark magic, etc). 

He cut through the woods for what felt like hours and as such he was not certain what time it was when he felt the compulsion pull at him again. He turned to find his path had closed up behind him as though it had never been at all. By the time he reached the lighthouse again it was nearly dark and the light was nearly out, and it felt like it had a hand around his soul and was pulling, like marionette strings. The magic it wanted him to do was in his hands and mouth unbidden and it burned such that he could hardly see. He felt his way upstairs on a run tripping once or twice and in the octagonal tower room he cast the spell and the relief was like a veil pulled off. Like a wash of ice after a bad fever. He lost his footing and eventually he sat on the floor. 

\--

He dreamt. For two weeks the dream had been the same but now it was different. He was cutting a path through the woods again but this time with an axe, and his hands hurt, because evidently he had been at it for a long time. Sirius was with him, but like a shadow version, because he kept trying to help but could not. 

“Where are you trying to go,” he said, at last. His voice was coming from far away. 

“I just want to know where I am.” 

“So you’ll stay here?” 

“I think so.” 

He put the axe down and Sirius took hold of his hands, which were red, and the blisters from swinging the axe had broken open and begun to bleed. Sirius’s hands were very cold and almost transparently pale. His sleeve had ridden up to show the knobby bone at his wrist and the smudgy blue ink of the stave tattooed just there. 

“Don’t leave,” Sirius said. “You have to stay here.” 

“Why’s that?” 

“I can’t say it. It’s just a feeling.” He turned Remus’s hands over and studied the wounds and Remus studied him. There were leaves and loam and dew in his hair which he had tied up off his face. He cast the spell that would heal the blisters, and Remus woke up on the floor in the tower room. 

It was dawn. His hands were open and cupped against the concrete and he watched — as though the dream continued. In his run up the stairs the evening previous he must have skinned his palms and they were raw and bloody. But the spell worked, and the new skin knit slowly over the broken places. 

At first he thought perhaps he had said it in his sleep or thought it with enough certainty he had enacted the magic himself. But still — almost — he could feel the ghost of the cool touch. “You have to stay here,” he remembered. 

\--

The spell lasted until noon, and then he cast another. With the rations Dumbledore had sent he made a lentil soup with Indian spices, and he made hot chocolate with cinnamon and sat on the outside stoop watching a storm blow in across the water. That night he stayed in the light room because he feared otherwise he wouldn’t be able to get to it against the screaming wind. He slept little, and the tower shook beneath him; he felt like a character in a fairy tale, or an Arthurian legend. Waiting upon the ramparts of the castle at Corbenic wounded and helpless and impotent as the Fisher King. In the gale the spells did not last very long and he was compelled to cast a Patronus every two hours or so until dawn, when the storm broke. 

He went downstairs and back to sleep for a few hours, then he walked on the beach collecting seaglass and driftwood and washed-up buoys and the appropriate kelps for use in assorted potions, and he sat in the sand and read the only book he had thought to bring with him, _A New Ethnography of the Hags of Appalachia_ by Laura Dolly. 

_I am aware that some humans consider me and my sisters trapped in these bodies_ , read a caption under a photograph. It was printed in shades of sepia and as such it looked rather like a work by Edward S. Curtis. In it a woman of indeterminable age, dressed in rags, leaned up against the side of a barn painted with hex signs. Her face was a human face but something about it was almost unspeakably wrong. _Many humans believe we are the way we are because of curses and whatnot. I was born like this […] I cannot separate myself or my identity from this body. I’m no more trapped in it than I’m trapped on earth. Humans are more trapped in their minds than I’m trapped in this body. — Margaret Johanssen, age 17, Hazard, Kentucky_

\--

In the night he sat inside at the table and listened to the wind outside and to his Stone Roses tape and tried to write. 

_bewitched woods a la american northwest resistant to human magic. cannot tell if this is coast or island. in the tower room the light is strengthened by patronus eg. weaponized edge / manifestation of soul. trying to figure out what this means. strong compulsion to maintain illumination of light attached to lighthouse keeper. cannot tell how this magic is performed. i wish i remembered anything about magical theory or had any books. meanwhile there are no ships. i am not sure what i am here guiding but when the light goes out it feels dire. like a cold buckling black dread different obviously from the usual one._

_dream is different / changed now but perhaps it is only the moon._

\--

That night in the narrow bed with the wool blankets he dreamed he was outside with Sirius walking in the high beach grass. Sirius held a thick knotted strand of bleached-white driftwood across his shoulders and the pockets of his jeans jangled with seaglass and shells. Above the sheaf of stars spread out like spilled dust and the moon in its first quarter tore a corner of the sky open above the sea. 

“You and your sticks,” said Remus. 

Sirius turned toward him. “Ever a dog,” he said. 

He had crouched to inspect a bit of blue willow pottery and when Remus stood behind him to observe he pressed it into Remus’s hand. His feet were bare, and he had cuffed his jeans up just past his ankles. 

“There’s got to be somewhere it’ll look nice,” he said, about the driftwood. 

“Wherever are you going to put like a massive hunk of — it looks like a dinosaur bone.” 

“It’s got history,” Sirius said, “touch it. You don’t know where it’s from. It could’ve floated here from distant isles. It could’ve broken off one of those Polynesian rafts and floated to us.” 

The piece of blue willow pottery in Remus’s hand was clammy and cold with seawater but the edges were rounded. The moon was dragging the tide up the beach leaving wracklines higher by day and the air smelled like a storm, and like the sea, and like the forest. “Have you figured out where you are,” said Sirius. 

“No idea.” 

“Nor have I. I suppose we’re in the same boat. It’s funny because I always thought if I could live one of your several traumas I would understand you better. But this just feels like a shitty joke.” 

Something stirred, almost nauseous, in his stomach. “What does.” 

“I’m almost here, but not really.” 

“Well where do you think — ”

“I just said I’ve got no idea, didn’t I?” His brow was furrowed, but he almost smiled. “Leave the goddamn light on — ” 

The compulsion pulled him out of it by the back of his neck, and he woke up in the small dark room. Outside it had almost begun to rain, and the flagstones were slippery with the night dew. On the beach the tide was so high it nearly touched the dunes and in another week or so the moon would be full. He climbed as though to his own hanging the stairs to the light room. Why, he was thinking, can I not remember being happy without him? After everything he did? 

Perhaps it was the very freshness of the wound. He could still make it bleed when he wanted to. 

First he had been a child, and the memories were fuzzy and bright, and then there was the black spot. The black spot which covered — which bled through like ink and subsumed. When he was eleven or twelve he was happyish but it was uncertain. When they had all told him they knew and they didn't care about it he remembered being more petrified with terror than overjoyed at their kindness. Sirius who was very young with his Addams Family pageboy haircut and always looking from under the blunt edge of his bangs with the bright grey eyes like the scion of a landed dynasty who had been discovered by his mother in the servants’ quarters torturing squirrels. Sly and fearful he would be caught at the slyness. Remus loved him at first he thought in the normal way. 

That part was a sick yellow spot like pus or bile. He felt raw-wrong like his whole body and his soul was a manifest wound. 

Did I get a sort of taste for it, sometimes he wondered (he lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling irredeemably turned on and horrified, he was fourteen or perhaps fifteen) when he came in the window, when he held me down, when — 

The night that Sirius brought him a Brian Eno cassette and kissed him. Then it turned black again. 

Waves of things. The night on the desert when he heard the nuclear cryptid things around his tent speaking to each other in clicks and screams and he thought, come and talk to me; I’m not unlike you. Mutilated by circumstance… 

He stood at the light which was dimming and the artificial panic hocketed through him like church bells. Then he recalled the morning after the night in Jasper when he had broken the Pensieve jar. The clouds and fog and the shattered bits of pink glass in the dregs of the night snow. He was thinking, I’ve done all I could and so I must go on. And so he had. 

In those days he had lived in a sort of false prison reality of his own construction. Of course these days were different but not by much. He tried to grasp it — the towering breathing blue slide of the glaciers and the low blush of lupines in the high meadow. When the spell came forth through him he did not think he even said it. 

The glass glowed, and for a while he watched it. The sea beyond stirring rapidly now in the rising wind. The light slid across it like the eye of God. It beat against the thick snarled wool of the heavy clouds. 

He went downstairs and out onto the dunes. He did not think he would get to sleep again. The wind moved like a hum of static in the high grass, and he walked through it, remembering the dream. The long white gnarl of driftwood — and the piece — 

Where he stepped the sand slid off something and he crouched to pick it up. It was the fragment of blue willow ceramic. There was a house painted on it in a spiderwebbed gestural pattern behind a copse of trees. Carefully as though it were precious he thumbed the soil from it. From the smooth edges. Something with him in the grass drawing a cold shadow up his spine — 

“There you are,” said Sirius, just behind him. 

He did not stand nor turn around. It couldn’t be — it must have been the wind. The moon which leached even through the clouds like a stain of bleach. 

“What’ve you got there?” His knees cracked. The grass stirred. He took it from Remus’s open hand. 

“It’s — you know maybe it got blown off a ship in a storm.” 

He turned just a little into the bright grey eyes. 

“It’s very like you to imagine some kind of depressing naval gothic,” Sirius said. “It’s probably just from the house.” He smiled, and then he knelt in the sand. He looked exhausted and rumpled from travel and the hand which held the ceramic piece was dirty under the fingernails but Remus grasped his wrist and it was warm. It had begun, almost tentatively, to rain. “You left the light on,” Sirius said. “And I thought I heard the Stone Roses.” 

**Author's Note:**

> join me / prompt me some more on [tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/).


End file.
